I'm sure we fall back on easy/fast associations and memories to answer. It's the way of least resistance. The text you quote bears more than a superficial similarity to the old riddle (there's really nothing else that looks like it), but that version also stipulates that the father has died. That adds "gendered" (what an ugly word) information to the question, a fact which is missed when recalling this particular answer. Basically, LLMs are stochastic parrots.
How people don’t see the irony of commenting “stochastic parrots” every time LLM reasoning failure comes up is beyond me.
There are ways to trick LLMs. There are also ways to trick people. If asking a tricky question and getting a wrong answer is enough to disprove reasoning, humans aren’t capable of reasoning, either.
