> I’d be remembering the cities rather than conjuring them
Having looked at some of them (and it being one of my favorite books) ... it won't do that. These visualizations are as terrible as they are unnecessary.
What is this for? It doesn't deepen the understanding of the book. The illustrations aren't attractive on their own. They're not a very good representation of the descriptions in the book.
This is something I see a lot too, and I almost covered it in the post. I think it goes hand in hand with excessive formality where people think that if you're writing a blog post about something, you have to be an authority on the topic, but that's not true.
It's valuable and useful to write about things when you're still a beginner as long as you present yourself as a beginner. Julia Evans does this extremely well. My favorite example is "Some notes on using nix,"[0] which got me to start using Nix when I'd seen lots of other posts from more experienced Nix users that were too in the weeds for me to understand. But the way Julia approaches it is that she's learned a little bit more than someone who's never touched it, so you can read her progress and get a slight head start from where you would have started without her notes.
Not OP, but it's the "as if I were an expert" part that rankles. It's fine to share your experiments and learning projects, but frame them as such. Some writers present their imperfect weekend experiments as if they're doing us a favor by giving out their genius for free.
Sometimes it's very easy to be confident about your expertise if you are not aware of all the complexities of a problem (See programmers and their assumptions about names and dates). So my point is a bit that it's very hard to judge that and I'd rather have someone share their learnings on their personal blog without hesitation and feeling the need to gate-keep blogging.
> I'd rather have someone share their learnings on their personal blog without hesitation and feeling the need to gate-keep blogging.
I understand what you're saying, but often well-written articles end up getting passed around and relied upon as if they were well supported documents. I don't know if it's as common now, but the Rails community went through waves of fads as someone wrote an article and then everyone read it, and started following what it said, when often it wasn't good advice in the first place.
It got the point where, if you looked at an old enough codebase, you could get a rough sense of how old some code was by looking at whatever fads it contained, and look back to see when that coding quirk was popular.
it's always appropriate to share, but share your actual findings, don't imply or assume they are generalized maxims representing more than what it looked like to one guy doing one thing one time without a lot of experience.
One way to make this even better is to include your questions about things you don't know. "I wonder if that means X or Y, perhaps one way to tell would be investigating it with method Z, whihc I haven't had time to do yet, I wonder if anyone else has or knows."
ZPG winds up not being as interesting, I think, because it doesn't figure out how to take the core idea of raking and twist it into more interesting puzzles, which is the classic puzzle approach: find a clean core mechanic, and then escalate on it.
FWIW, I wish you'd spent a few minutes cleaning up the first dozen pages of Claudespeak. You have some human text at the bottom of the post, but first you force your readers to wade through (or skim, or just close the tab) stuff like "Solver experiments show the bare rule is loose" — "is a chore with the shape of a puzzle:" — "test candidate mechanics on thousands of random gardens with an exact solver, a constraint-programming optimizer, and a deductive difficulty grader" — "the only U-turn-free raking among 12 par rakings of 6,310,226. Ripple stones and wave bands, the obvious “pattern” constraints, add texture but not tightness" — ...
You do see how that's all garbage, right? So why not just delete it? Keep the good part, delete the bad part.
The game widget itself takes up 3 pages on mobile, because of all the Claude web design.
... Wait, as I scroll down again in composing this complaint, I realize I'm wrong about there being any human text at all. It's all garbage. This makes me kind of sad for the Gwern we've lost.
> 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 think that because you made your name through the quality of your writing and the excellence of your web design, an unrefined output like this jeopardizes your brand. Perhaps there should be a link saying, "I didn't have the time to do a full writeup of this, but click this link to show some Claudeslop explaining it in further detail."
For what it's worth, I really enjoyed this submission and looked at it for a while with my son last night. Yes, it's AI-generated, but I think there's quite a bit to extract that's interesting, so I appreciate you posting it.
For what it’s worth, I too was a little surprised and disappointed by the quality of the prose, until I double-checked the url and realised this was more like “a design doc artifact hosted on gwern.net” than “an article posted on gwern.net”.
> I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had.
Just ignore it Gwern.
There is a vocal minority here who like to complain about any output generated by AI as if all writing is some sanctified art form rather than a means of communication.
I love your writings. I also found the AI writeup of the project well structured and easy to read.
> I'm surprised at this reaction to a prototype game implementing an idea I had
Seeing a gwern comment get downvoted is a first for me. An odd sight.
I feel like I might have a unique perspective here. I absolutely hate slop, but I've also experimented a lot this year with AI game dev. I was shocked at the negativity (being told snidely to "learn to code" despite having made games for decades).
This seems like a clash of an extremely AI pilled person coming into contact with the often irrational and overwhelming backlash against AI, which is common even on HN these days.
Slop is only an issue is when it's implied to be handwritten. Because then someone is asking me to waste my time reading something they didn't spend time writing. That's not the case here since you've called out the AI contribution, but I bet a lot of people are skimming over it.
The real problem I see here is that Claude often doesn't have a sense of what's interesting. In the 30,000 word write up, I don't see anything particularly new and interesting about the prototype.
I see: using turns as a score, Hamiltonian paths, and a reference to a "wide rake" and "no u-turns" which either I don't understand or doesn't show up until late into the game. If there is something interesting in there, Claude hasn't convinced me of it!
Where the audience starts getting rightly annoyed is an irreverence to the existing prior art and an overestimation of how unique/interesting this prototype is (presumably fueled by discussions with Claude), particularly these statements:
> I came up with the original idea entirely independently [an idea that is predated by 20 years]
> ZPG winds up not being as interesting, I think
Let me state: you've made something neat! I like the concept, I like the heightmap aesthetic. Fwiw, most of my vibe coding experiments were about digging in sand using voxels.
However, people are hypersensitive to anyone easily impressed by AI output while simultaneously downplaying the value of human creativity.
They have some responsibility for people's expectations of the product, at least. They want the personal assistant personas to be able to help you with anything, and don't point out that they'll be judging your thoughts along the way.
For anyone technically inclined it should be obvious, but it isn't part of the zeitgeist or how they pitch it. People see it as being different than talking to a human, and behave as if there won't be a human in the mix.
Having looked at some of them (and it being one of my favorite books) ... it won't do that. These visualizations are as terrible as they are unnecessary.
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