Samon: Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle

Commenters discussed Gwern’s “Samon” zen-garden raking puzzle, with several praising its depth and mechanics and others pointing to related works: Wowfunhappy recommended Cardinal Chains, mcphage recalled the 90s Zen Puzzle Garden, and lubujackson called the project “surprisingly deep.” contingencies and others proposed many ways to escalate difficulty - animal interactions, weather, fluids, plant ecology - while TZubiri suggested a whimsical CSS-transpile entry to a Zen Garden zine. duhhhhh1212 and Pangram noted the obvious LLM involvement, and quuxplusone and verdverm argued about whether the Claude-generated prose and UI clutter detracted from the experience.

Opinion divides sharply over authenticity and authorship. ballmerpoint argued the puzzle framing and AI-designed GUI betray the meditative Karesansui tradition and add unnatural constraints, while gwern defended his choices, saying he originated the idea independently, that Claude’s solver and constraint work added interesting features (hinting, par challenges), and that metadata permits players to skip the writeup via a #play anchor. quuxplusone called much of the Claude text “garbage,” and gwern responded that parts are valuable and that he’s been tweaking the UI. The split is between those who appreciate a puzzle escalation and technical novelty and those who want ritual authenticity and cleaner human curation.