Thank HN: The puzzle game I posted here 6 weeks ago got licensed by The Atlantic

Very cool. I was very curious to see how AI would do. I tried Gemini 2.5 Pro:

> whats the answer to this where you replace the bracketed sections with words?

> the [second rock from the [dial ([two-dimensional [your ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] puppet projected on a wall]-based clock)]] de Milo is discovered by a Greek [guy with a [kind of stop for a [vehicle that's a palindrome ]]chfork that's not the [[[a mechanic might look under it] color for a little girl with a wolf problem] spandex halloween costume, maybe]]

Response:

    Okay, let's break this down piece by piece:
    
    ["the of nowhere"] one can get you grounded] -> "middle" (middle of nowhere), but being sent to "your room" gets you grounded. Let's stick with room.
    
    [your [room] one can get you grounded] -> room (as discussed).
    
    [two-dimensional [room] puppet projected on a wall] -> A 2D projection on a wall is a shadow. (The 'room' clue seems less direct here, 'shadow puppet' is the key).
    
    [dial ([shadow]-based clock)] -> A clock using shadows and a dial is a sundial.
    
    [second rock from the [sundial]] -> The "sundial" represents the Sun. The second rock (planet) from the Sun is Venus.
    
    [vehicle that's a palindrome ] -> racecar.
    
    [kind of stop for a [racecar]] -> pit (pit stop).
    
    [a mechanic might look under it] -> hood.
    
    [[hood] color for a little girl with a wolf problem] -> Little Red Riding Hood's color is red.
    
    [[red] spandex halloween costume, maybe] -> This describes something that is not the pitchfork. A pitchfork is not a red spandex costume. This part confirms the item described earlier.
    
    [guy with a [pit]chfork that's not the [red spandex halloween costume, maybe]] -> Combining "pit" and "chfork" gives pitchfork. A guy with a pitchfork, especially in a Greek context finding an artifact, is likely a farmer (or peasant).
    
    Putting it all together:
    
    The Venus de Milo is discovered by a Greek farmer.

I'd like to provide you with some constructive feedback on your comment:

1. You should include what you think is interesting about the large language model's ability to solve the word puzzle. It's not obvious to me as a reader.

2. You shouldn't post the step-by-step solution to a puzzle, regardless of how it was derived. It's unlikely that anyone will read through it, and if they do, they're less likely to try the puzzle themselves.

I mean, I thought it was an interesting read... I'm sorry you didn't

It's not actually solving the puzzle, for one. Like half the steps are obviously nonsense.

I was actually quite interested, even though it's more of a comment about AI than about the game.

I would note that I think the LLM had trouble because copying and pasting from the puzzle omits all the blank word underlines ("____"). I've dealt with this when copying into my own notepad for trying to work it out myself.

This about jives with my normal experience with the LLMs - a superficially valid answer that falls apart when you start interrogating how and what it actually did.

What did you find interesting?

What did you find interesting about it?

Are you sure about that? It correctly solves the puzzle.

Each step (though a little confusing to parse) does make sense in context.

The first line is already nonsense. The answer is obviously not "room".

Getting the correct final answer tells you nothing about the reasoning. The LLM will solve the puzzle even if you only pass it the sentence "the [] de Milo is discovered by a Greek []".

> Each step (though a little confusing to parse) does make sense in context.

The proposed intermediate answers don't make sense, and they're the actual puzzle. You must answer all the intermediates correctly, you can't skip levels.

The following ones clearly aren't correct (I think, I hadn't actually done that puzzle):

["the of nowhere"] -> middle; the model gets that right, but garbles the answer due to not correctly extracting the clue and having trailing garbage

[your [middle] one can get you grounded] -> finger; "room" as suggested by model makes no sense

[two-dimensional [finger] puppet projected on a wall] -> shadow; the model gets this right, but only by ignoring the clue completely, which means the justification is nonsense

[dial ([shadow]-based clock)] -> sun; the model says sundial, which then forces it to make an inane "a sundial represents the sun" argument at the next level.

[[red] spandex halloween costume, maybe] -> devil; the model doesn't give an answer word at all for this, but just says that "a red spandex costume is not a pitchfork"