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:
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:
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
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
Not as clever as the NYT’s clues, but not terrible, either.