Samon: Zen garden puzzle design and a playable prototype
What happened
On October 6, Hacker News' front page covered Samon, a karesansui raking puzzle designed by Gwern and Claude-5.5-opus. The player starts at the gate and covers all cells of a 7×7 sand garden in one stroke, then rakes the pattern back in reverse. Under the bare rules the garden has 1,510,446 legal rakings; scored by turn count, only 66 reach the 12-turn par, mostly parallel lines and rings around stones. A "wide rake" rule that forbids U-turns in empty sand makes gardens often converge on a unique solution. A playable prototype now implements 148 gardens, each with a poem.
Written by AI from the coverage · updated 2 hours ago
Coverage
Follow the reports to see the story from different sides.
- Hacker News front pageSamon: Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle
Gwern 与 Claude-5.5-opus 设计了枯山水耙沙解谜游戏 Samon，玩家从门出发一笔覆盖 7×7 沙庭全部格子，再倒走耙出纹路。裸规则下该沙庭有 1,510,446 种合法耙法，按转弯数计分后仅 66 种达到 12 转的 par，且多为平行线与石周环纹。加入禁止在空沙中掉头的"宽耙"规则后，沙庭常收敛到唯一解。原型已实现 148 个庭园及配诗。
Heat over time
Not enough continuous observations to draw a trend yet.