NYT “Connections” November 28: Hints and answers for game #536

We all have our own strategy when it comes to trying to solve daily word puzzles such as Connections.

But one group of researchers from the New York University Tandon School of Engineering decided to work out how artificial intelligence programs fared at solving the game.

“Large Language Models are becoming increasingly widespread, and investigating where they fail in the context of the Connections puzzle can reveal limitations in how they process semantic information,” Graham Todd, a Ph.D. student in the NYU Game Innovation Lab, said in a statement in May.

Researchers found in preliminary results that AI was still far from mastering the game.

“Our research confirms prior work showing this sort of ‘chain-of-thought’ prompting can make language models think in more structured ways,” said Timothy Merino, another Ph.D. student. “Asking the language models to reason about the tasks that they’re accomplishing helps them perform better.”

How to Play ‘Connections’

The categories vary in difficulty from yellow to green to blue to purple, with yellow considered the easiest category and purple the trickiest.

For example, a recent game linked the words “braid,” “bun,” “pony” and “twist” under the category: “Ways to wear your hair up.” This was a blue category.

Once you have selected four words, you click the “submit” button. If your choices match a category, they will appear in the category color and disappear from the grid. If they are incorrect, however, they will remain gray and stay on the board.

If you are stuck, try selecting the “shuffle” button to move the words to a different place on the grid.

Newsweek has put together some hints as well as the answers for Thursday’s game, so be careful scrolling down if you want to solve it by yourself.