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korymath | 1 year ago

I've not found a solution at any NxN size made by human or machine.

discuss

order

quuxplusone|1 year ago

You might get a little closer by tweaking the prompt — you're asking the LLM to "figure out" that the first step is to create two 5x5 word squares with no repeated words, and then the second step is to solve ten requests of the form, "Give me a crossword-style clue that could be reasonably solved by either the words OPERA or the word TENET" (for each of the ten word-pairs in your square-pairs). However, LLMs are based on tokens, and thus fundamentally don't "understand" that words are made out of letters — that's why we have memes about their inability to count the number of "r"s in "strawberry" and so on. So we shouldn't expect an LLM to be able to perform Step 1 at all, really. And Step 2 requires wordplay and/or lateral thinking, which LLMs are again bad at. (They can easily do "Give me a crossword-style clue that could be solved by the word OPERA," because there are databases of such things on the web which form part of every LLM's dataset. But there's no such database for double-solution clues.)

Generating a 5x5 word square (with different words across and down, so not of the "Sator Arepo" variety) is already really hard for a human. I plugged the Wordle target word list into https://github.com/Quuxplusone/xword/blob/master/src/xword-f... to get a bunch of plausible squares like this:

    SCALD
    POLAR
    ARTSY
    CEASE
    ERROR
But you want two word squares that can plausibly be clued together, which is (not impossible, but) difficult if matching entries aren't the same part of speech. For example, cluing "POLAR" together with "ARTSY" (both adjectives) seems likely more doable than cluing "POLAR" together with "LASSO" (noun or verb).

Anyway, here's my attempt at a human solution, using the grid above — and another grid, which I'll challenge you to find from these clues. Hint: All but two of the ten pairs match, part-of-speech-wise.

    1A. Remove the outer layer of, perhaps  
    2A. Region on a globe  
    3A. Like some movie theaters  
    4A. Command to a lawbreaker  
    5A. Rhyme for Tom Lehrer?  
    1D. ____yard (sometime sci-fi setting)  
    2D. It goes something like this: Ꮎ  
    3D. Feature of liturgy, often  
    4D. It's vacuous, in a sense  
    5D. Fino, vis-a-vis Pedro Ximénez