I really liked Zen Puzzle Garden back in the day. I spent a lot of time playing it when I ought to have been working on my PhD, and I even ended up writing a paper on it. [0]
It’s interesting that Gwern explicitly mentions ZPG as an inferior predecessor, because – for reasons I cannot clearly articulate or explain – I find it much more enjoyable to play than Samon. The player experience feels a lot more polished.
For a while, you could upload your own ZPG garden designs to the Lexaloffle BBS, where they would be playable on the web. I designed a few brutally difficult gardens, which were unsolved for years. Good times.
Mm, most of those sound like they would just add complexity, rather than fun. You find the optimal raking and then a squirrel RNG scampers across the grid? Fluid mechanics can be fun, but I have no idea how I would integrate them...
If you have ideas, you could try vibecoding them and see if they work. The page should be fully self-contained and have everything an agentic LLM could need.
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."
> 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.
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 know we're all shocked that a 1-page web app with the author byline "Gwern, Claude-5.5-opus" (and matching HTML metadata) may have had LLMs involved; good work by Pangram there exposing the imposture.
I really liked Zen Puzzle Garden back in the day. I spent a lot of time playing it when I ought to have been working on my PhD, and I even ended up writing a paper on it. [0]
It’s interesting that Gwern explicitly mentions ZPG as an inferior predecessor, because – for reasons I cannot clearly articulate or explain – I find it much more enjoyable to play than Samon. The player experience feels a lot more polished.
For a while, you could upload your own ZPG garden designs to the Lexaloffle BBS, where they would be playable on the web. I designed a few brutally difficult gardens, which were unsolved for years. Good times.
0. https://arxiv.org/abs/1106.2104
I have really enjoyed "Zen Puzzle Garden" by lexaloffle: https://www.lexaloffle.com/zen.php
If you like this, I happen to think Cardinal Chains is a more interesting take on the same overall concept: https://danijmn.itch.io/cardinalchains
Surprisingly deep and seems quite in line with the underlying concept of Zen gardens.
Not at all. Karesansui almost never exhibit Hamiltonian paths and rarely feature ninety-degree turns.
The process is intended to be meditative, but this maximalist, AI-designed GUI and the “puzzle” framing both obstruct that.
Ideas for elevated difficulty and more complex mechanics: animal interactions, precipitation, water interactions, wind interactions, directional and variant lighting, mirrors, earthquakes, plant/fern/bryophyte interactions (volunteer plants, spreading plants, pop-ups, seasonal flowering, seed dropping), plants that respond to nutrient/sun/seasonal conditions, littering humans.
Mm, most of those sound like they would just add complexity, rather than fun. You find the optimal raking and then a squirrel RNG scampers across the grid? Fluid mechanics can be fun, but I have no idea how I would integrate them...
If you have ideas, you could try vibecoding them and see if they work. The page should be fully self-contained and have everything an agentic LLM could need.
I have a real garden, no need for the virtual one :)
Core mechanic was that you have to achieve a defined end state and the interactions can help you to do so with additional complexity.
It’s not exactly the same, but Zen Puzzle Garden (https://www.lexaloffle.com/zen.php) has been around since the 90s.
Yeah, I came up with the original idea entirely independently back in 2023 (https://gwern.net/idea#zen-sand-garden-puzzle-game) and postponed it until LLMs could code it up for me (ie. now), and Claude/ChatGPT turned that up as prior art while researching it: https://gwern.net/doc/design/2026-10-03-gwern-samon.html#mec...
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."
> 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.
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”.
Yeah, I do these sometimes. Like https://gwern.net/doc/design/2026-09-17-claude51fable-thepur... or https://gwern.net/doc/reinforcement-learning/safe/2026-08-16... or https://gwern.net/doc/ai/nn/transformer/gpt/claude/4/2026-02... . Usually they aren't playable, though, although I have some prototypes of _Goodhart's Garden_ I need to playtest a bit for feedback.
If you transpile convert this to CSS with some turing complete JS to CSS transpiler, you could submit this to that Zen Garden CSS zine
https://www.pangram.com/history/cfc9ee7e-b1f5-4ce0-8377-6102...
No surprise there.
I know we're all shocked that a 1-page web app with the author byline "Gwern, Claude-5.5-opus" (and matching HTML metadata) may have had LLMs involved; good work by Pangram there exposing the imposture.
That aside, did you enjoy the game?
Yeah that’s why I said no surprise there.
your constant need to do this is more annoying than the original post
if you don't like the content, flag it and move on please