Machine Charades

Most word games ask you to find the answer. Machine Charades shows you the answer and makes you explain it to a machine. You get a word. Say GIRAFFE. Write a clue, and a language model gets three guesses. Five obvious words are blocked that day — neck, tall, africa, zoo, spots — and variations are caught too, so "necked" and "spotty" won't slip past. You have to go around. Here's the twist that emerged while building it: the machine is good. It gets almost any fair clue on the first try. So the game isn't "can you make it guess" — it's how few characters can you do it in. "long yellow tree eater" works. Under twenty characters is genuinely hard. Every puzzle shows par: the median clue length among everyone who has solved it. Your score isn't a number in a vacuum. Beating par is the game. Thirty seconds a day. One puzzle, shared by everyone, with a new word every morning. MACHINE…