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I love the NYT mini so I made some scripts and HTML to auto generate more 5x5 puzzles, posting one very day at my site

• tkgally 2y ago
  Great effort! I'm a fan of the NYT Mini, too. The art of that puzzle, I think, is in the clues, which are usually not straight synonyms or dictionary-type definitions. Some examples from recent puzzles: Name tag heading: HELLO Word shouted during a defibrillator scene in a hospital drama: CLEAR Kind of orange with a "belly button": NAVEL "I'm not a ____" (online affirmation next to a checkbox): ROBOT What breweries might creatively repurpose as seats: KEGS I haven’t tried [1], but it might be hard to get an LLM to produce such clues consistently. I’m not sure how well I would do at it myself. Another feature of the NYT Mini is that the creators seem to limit the number of pop-culture facts to at most one per puzzle. I’m bad at names of actors, cartoon characters, pop stars, etc., but I’m usually able to solve the puzzles even when they have clues and answers like Ogre who asks "What are you doing in my swamp?!": SHREK because I can get the answers in the other direction. [1] A few minutes later: I did try. I gave Claude 3.5 Sonnet the above clues and answers as examples and asked it to produce clues for today’s NYT Mini answers. Here are the results: https://gally.net/temp/20240904miniclues/index.html https://gally.net/temp/20240904miniclues/index.html Not as clever as the NYT’s clues, but not terrible, either.
• navjordj 2y ago
  Could you share some details on what algorithm you use to generate the puzzles?
• beardyw 2y ago
  Did you auto generate the clues?
  • ldom22 2y ago
    Kind of. They are auto gen from Wikipedia content but I edited them manually so they were shorter and made more sense
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • hougaard 2y ago
      Sounds like an llm task.