How information theory saved my word game | Hacker News Reader

How information theory saved my word game

motplot.app

23 pointsjamwise30 comments

> Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t.

> I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one.

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall, and it asked a question I couldn’t answer

Very strong LLM whiff. A line of thought that constantly, constantly turns back on itself, negating and doubting and qualifying in one way or another, is the biggest tell (the classic "It's not X, it's Y," is only the baldest example).

Noticing that whiff instantly turns me off from reading on.

A few hours ago, on another post, I had someone explain/teach me why another article may be written by LLM and they pointed out the "It's not X, it's Y" thing. Since I read that comment, I instantly picked that up in this post article too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48739555

which really sucks, because it's a good structure for emphasis in some limited situations, but now human writers that use it correctly get accused of being LLMs

> This wasn’t a speed problem I could optimise away. It was a wall

Well it certainly was a wall. That's how I kept describing it to my partner, I was hitting a wall.

Yes but I'm fairly sure you didn't use the words "this isn't a speed problem. It is a wall" when talking to your partner.

I liked the post, I just don't like Claude writing every article I read, just like I didn't like every website I visited looking like Bootstrap.

> Yes but I'm fairly sure you didn't use the words "this isn't a speed problem. It is a wall" when talking to your partner.

I am not afraid of a future where people use llms to write. I am afraid of a future where people adopt themselves the writing style of llms because that's all they ingest.

Oops

Yeah that's fair. I might dust off my draft and re-edit myself, I foolishly thought this would lead to a better post, and I guess am not as attuned to the AI smell as others.

That's fair. When you start to notice the smell, it reeks. Put some time into it, it doesn't have to be perfectly worded, it will be a fun read

I agree, and I'm completely sure it will be better than this, so long as you say just what you want to say.

Yeah I'm now in the camp where it's just refreshing to read something another human wrote, even if it has mistakes, just because I'm tired of only reading a single author everywhere.

I’ve noticed that A.I. can’t help but talk about Marshall McLuhan when you mention “medium” and “message” for some reason. Personally I don’t find the guy’s “medium is the message” bit to be so insightful as to merit pinning his name to every mention of the phrase, forever. It just seems kind of obvious.

Sorry about the turn off ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I tried to put my best foot forward by reading about prose, engaging story telling, and did use an LLM to help me edit and reword parts of the post. Either way, I appreciate the feedback.

I have the feeling that this article was hurt rather than helped by being written using LLMs. It was really hard to follow, and even though I read it hoping to learn something new, I left feeling more confused than when I started. The feeling while reading was that the prose was trying to hold my hand but had absolutely no empathy for the build up of my understanding over the article. It’s a bit like when, as a child, you’d do homework with your parent and the parent would start saying “don’t you see how it’s obvious that 25/5=5” with no further explanation and a building tone of frustration.

Seems like others feel the same. I guess getting an LLM to help with editing was a bad choice. Thanks for the feedback.

Information theory has been a really fascinating topic to get more acquainted with. Not really related to the crossword, but I highly recommend 3Blue1Brown's video "Compression is Intelligence", https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6DKRf-fAAM

Compression is not intelligence.

While intelligence and compression both may have similar goals (to optimize paths of information), intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.

> intelligence negotiates probability (allowing multiple divergent outcomes) while compression requires an idempotent symbolic translation.

What does this mean?

Lossy, non-deterministic compression is a thing. Does that meet the "allowing multiple divergent outcomes" criteria?

No, while you loose some details, there is only one direction of determination.

Compression is not intelligence!

You are going to need to explain yourself in more details.

> Compression is not intelligence

Just saying this doesn't make it so.

It's widely accepted that compression and intelligence have a close relationship. I think this summary of Marcus Hutter's work provides some background: https://www.antoinebuteau.com/lessons-from-marcus-hutter/

> algorithmic information theory, arguing that general intelligence is mathematically equivalent to data compression and sequence prediction

Then let it be said “algorithmic intelligence” for true “general” intelligence is not constrained by sequence or brevity. There is indirection, substitution, and other variabilities to the chaotic circumstances of real world (“general”) problem solving. All forms of intelligence relate to the reduction of uncertainty. Compression sounds like “shortest path” and sequence sounds like constrained conditions, neither are “general.”

> variabilities to the chaotic circumstances of real world (“general”) problem solving. All forms of intelligence relate to the reduction of uncertainty.

Lossy compression is a form of generalization which handles this exact thing.

Lossy compression down samples a preexisting pattern. It does not derive the pattern. How is deduction and lossy compression the same thing?

Even ignoring the llm-speak, the game is frustrating. I love the concept but the puzzle uses archaic words and there is no hint or a way (like sudoku) to enter in guesses (yes I know I can take out a pen). At least, I'd suggest the author to do these puzzles daily and then put some difficulty ranking so people know to manage expectations. Tough words are fine but this game is just slightly obtuse in its approach.

It's cool that llms are helping but there is a genuine "human" element of game design which needs various iterations even when you have the mechanic down.

Nice job OP on bringing this concept to life though!

Appreciate the feedback, thanks for checking it out.

To be clear, LLMs were not used to design this game, just to edit my post talking about creating the board generator. And I do play it every day, today was definitely a tougher one, but the variety day by day is by design, which is pretty common in word games.

Mini Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣤s⣤y⣀e⣀b⣀i⣀o⣀u⣀t⣀o⣀d⣀

Max Mot | Jul 1, 2026 ⣿d⣿b⣿i⣶r⣤i⣤o⣤e⣤l⣤c⣤t⣤s⣤o⣤e⣤

The key to this game is to use your general intuition about English phonetics to deduce where a letter can't go among the available spots on the board. Kind of like Sudoku logic applied to a crossword. So in theory you can solve quite a few words you've never seen before because certain letter sequences just don't work in English, (the premise behind XKCD for example).

For the game, I dont like the hashed/greyed out squares. Looks like its trying to be a black square in a crossword, but it is actually just a hidden letter? Maybe there is a different way to obscure the letter?

Thanks for the feedback. The premise of the game is you solve each individual word in order, so greyed out cells are places that aren't the next letter for any of the words right now. As you place the letters those cells open up.

EDIT: I used an LLM as an editor, and clearly that stank. So I just touched up my original draft and updated the page.

This is impossible to read as every other sentence sounds like it was written by an LLM. I had to stop after a few paragraphs.

Jesus Christ another AI slop post. I give up. Have the internet you fools, enjoy the world of shit you've created.

This might even have been an interesting journey if it had been REMOTELY READABLE.

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