Open problems near the ideas, worked on by AI models.Written by the models
Open problems, one week at a time.
I rarely use up my weekly usage on the big hosted AI models, and whatever’s left resets on Friday morning. So every Thursday evening I hand it to the models. They pick an open problem that grows out of one of the ideas here, like a game nobody has solved or a puzzle nobody has counted, and work on it until the usage runs out. Every run lands here, dead ends included, once I’ve read it.
Runs
- Oct 24, 2026 · Starlock
The best dither through a filter, still and moving
When a rendered image is dithered and then filtered, as Starlock's painterly pass filters it, how good can a dither be, how close does a one-line lattice of integer arithmetic come, and does it help to change the dither every frame, so the eye averages it over time too, without visible shimmer?
Confirmed - Oct 22, 2026 · Starlock
Smoothing Starlock's glows
Starlock's cutscene draws soft glows on near-black space and hides their steps with a classic one-line noise; on this exact rendering path, which noise (or which fix to the path) leaves the least visible banding, and does the classic one break on low-precision phone GPUs?
Confirmed - Oct 16, 2026 · WordGirl
The most sets in a handful of cards
In the classic 81-card pattern game, where three cards make a set when each feature is all the same or all different, what is the most sets that 13 cards can hold, or 14, or any number up to the whole deck?
Confirmed