I learned on the radio that last November 29th marked the 50th anniversary of the classic arcade game Pong. This game is particularly meaningful for those of us that do RL research, as it is one of the games that is part of the Arcade Learning Environment, one of the most popular benchmarks. Pong is probably the easiest game of the whole suite, so we often use it as a test to make sure our agents are learning. Learning curves below are for agents trained with the Dopamine framework.

I have become obsessed with crossword puzzles, specifically the NYT crosswords, since my friend Ralph Crewe gently forced me to start doing them. Although I’m not still at his level, I’ve been working on them daily and getting noticeably better.

In doing so I’ve come to realize they are a fantastic mechanism for testing generally capable problem-solving, and in this post would like to explain the various types of challenges they present. I’ll be using past NYT crossword puzzles as examples (they’re all at least a week old so should hopefully not be spoilers for anyone).

A palindrome is a phrase that reads the same way from left to right, and right to left. The rules are that all characters must be used in both directions, but punctuation, capitalization, and spaces can be ignored.

¡Las mismas reglas en español!

Some well-known Palindromes:

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama!

Do geese see god?

Yo, banana boy!

Unos palíndromos en español:

Dábale arroz a la zorra el abad.