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My smoke test for new models is to get it to generate a crossword, and this is the first time it's done a good job on the layout:

  ■  S  W  A  M
  B  L  A  M  E
  E  A  G  E  R
  A  T  O  N  E
  M  E  N  D  ■
The full conversation: https://claude.ai/share/60bd0c71-b576-4f8b-a272-ca1af982874c


Impressive, but the response seemed to mix 4 down and 5 down.

The clue for 4 down is:

> Structural girder funded by an infrastructure bill (4)

but in the laid-out answer key (which you posted), and in the "corrected" list of answers, 4 down is "MERE".

"WAGON" as the answer for "bandwagon you might jump on" is pretty weird too.

The current events / political references are pretty non-specific, kind of like the DJ 3000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnGaf0p9x1U

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I copy-pasted your prompt with Sonnet 4.6 Low and, to my delight, I got a working interactive puzzle you can actually solve inline in the chat. The clues and answers are totally bogus, though: it looks like in my chat, the LLM only verified that the clues going across make any sense.

Like, come on:

> 3D — (O,D,A,O,S) — The crossing letters in column 2, running through OADOS.

Truly these things are slot machines. https://claude.ai/share/4a89b15c-d028-4a31-988a-137813ee7d84

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edit: I'm a bit obsessed with this prompt: I tried it again with Opus 4.8 High, and it got stuck in a thinking loop without really doing anything and I lost patience with it.

It's also interesting that Anthropic's UI for a shared chatlog doesn't seem to include the model that was used in it. Nor does it include the "reasoning" loop that I interrupted.

https://claude.ai/share/0f5b5731-9615-4aea-8cfe-a61e658669bf




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