@hankgreen.bsky.social Love the new 4x3 word game! I thought of it as a Venn Diagram (see image). This way, you can make other patterns, e.g. I made an "outer square". I created an app where you can play & make more here marimo.app?slug=708we4 and a 6 minute YouTube tutorial youtu.be/VVunnwwupT4

Here's a gif of one of the Triangle Creatures! It is trained purely from the reward signal it sees at the end of 9 "steps", and it learned which moves to do purely from that. The animal words are like "action words" that correspond to the various ways it can move its muscles.

Here's an updated gif (now in Manim!) that also shows the Triangle Creature's inner monolgue (i.e. the sequence of tokens it is trained on)

I used the DeepSeek Reinforcement Learning GRPO algorithm to train a triangle creature. The edges are "muscles": red=extend, blue=contract; vertices are "mass pumps": red=grow, blue=shrink. Reward = DeltaX - |DeltaY|. Full video incoming: Subscribe at www.youtube.com/@MihaiNicaMath

Update: I remembered I had drawn some brown sharpie-esque comics when I was a postdoc at U of T and included a link to them in my teaching dossier when I applied for jobs! Just dug them up and thought you might get a kick out of it

Best one I could come up with....the Kraken holding the tiny cross makes me happy.