gwern

Well, since you seem to imply that Egan is unhappy with it, and I do not want to host such documents against anyone's wishes, I've gone ahead and removed it anyway. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Well, if Egan doesn't like it, I am happy to take the PDF down, just as I am with all documents I host. (If Egan hadn't pre-emptively blocked me on Twitter without us ever having interacted, he could have simply DMed me, but a comment here or an email would also work fine.)

As for crediting by name: the formatting is as in the original, and I am not responsible for that; I am responsible for the URL and PDF metadata, both of which credit Greg Egan (as I put a lot of work in setting correct PDF metadata in general to be a good citizen).

You are missing the point. The goal is not to find good ways to do steganography, or get the models to do the best possible steganography. The point is to naturalistically observe their initial impulses towards weak simple cooperative steganography, to try to get an idea of where any 'steganographic left turn' would begin and what it would look like and perhaps how one would go about detecting or preventing it or looking for it out in the wild, etc. OP was perfectly clear about this:

>This could be a precursor to steganography in images. Currently, the act of decoding the hidden messages is still obvious if you monitor the tool calls of the decoding model, so we don't claim it is currently dangerous.

I wasn't thinking of the general public but other groups like AI researchers (cf. surveys) or HN - but alright, how about changes in unpopular sentiments? What group would you propose believes in the Singularity less than they did in 2016? (There are many groups now that believe it in at quite low rates and are highly hostile to the idea, but I would say they were even more hostile to it then.)

Mm, most of those sound like they would just add complexity, rather than fun. You find the optimal raking and then a squirrel RNG scampers across the grid? Fluid mechanics can be fun, but I have no idea how I would integrate them...

If you have ideas, you could try vibecoding them and see if they work. The page should be fully self-contained and have everything an agentic LLM could need.

> But first you force your readers to wade through (or skim, or just close the tab)

FWIW, I do not force anyone to, because the URL I shared on my Twitter/Substack/Reddit has the '#play' hash-anchor to skip to the prototype game, and leave Claude's writeup for those who care. Take it up with OP if you dislike where they pointed the submission to. I provided the necessary standardized metadata for readers to skip to the part they want (clearly hyperlinked at top), the rest is up to them.

> You do see how that's all garbage, right?

I don't, because that's not true. There's a lot of interesting stuff in just the parts you quote as 'garbage'. For example, I was surprised by the exact solver and constraint optimization that Claude chose to do, which led to some of the more interesting features of the puzzle like the hinting feature or the 'par' challenge (and the existence of multiple solutions but some of which are optimal, and challenging you to reach optimal rakes, is one of the things that distinguishes it most from similar puzzles like 'Cardinal Chains' or ZPG). And this is one reason the title is 'Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle', as opposed to just 'A Zen Garden Raking Puzzle', because Claude/Astra took it in some interesting directions compared to my original proposal, due to their coding and algorithmic prowess. Had it just been me, I probably would've gone for a unique-solution approach like everyone else.

> The game widget itself takes up 3 pages on mobile, because of all the Claude web design.

Not sure what you mean. I just opened it up on my Pixel phone and it looks entirely playable on one screen to me. Are you referring to the level table of contents at the bottom or the poems...? Obviously there's no problem with those taking up more than 1 page because you don't need to consult them to play. (Anyway, I'll note for the record I've been tweaking it since the first uploaded version to streamline the UI/UX a bit based on Said Achmiz's feedback, so the latest version may be more to your taste.)

> This makes me kind of sad for the Gwern we've lost.

I'll fetch the smelling salts, but I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had.

I know we're all shocked that a 1-page web app with the author byline "Gwern, Claude-5.5-opus" (and matching HTML metadata) may have had LLMs involved; good work by Pangram there exposing the imposture.

That aside, did you enjoy the game?

This has been a perennial problem with my own generated comics with both Nano Banana Pro and ChatGPT (all generations). I often have to put in an extra edit to erase the false signature. It is annoying and I'm unsurprised most users don't bother.

Gyges took down the original post, hence the weird PDF repost, because of what he said were errors.

No, it's an upper bound, which is quite useful. And the more adjustments and demographic covariates you make, the better your bound gets.

> The goal of the game is to give hints to a secret word without giving the same hint as another player; it was shocking how often all the agents playing would give the same hint, even at temperature 1. We resolved this by giving them all “personalities” which were really just topics; for example we’d be telling one agent to think about things in the context of sports, so their clue for “shell” might be “defense” or something, whereas the agent told to be a hippie might say “cancer” for the zodiac’s crab.

Mode-collapse is characteristic of pretty much all chatbots post-davinci-002 and a major challenge to anything creative or game-like.