New York Times' Connections: A Case Study on NLP in Word Games — Shafik Quoraishee, NYT Games
Jul 5, 2025 · 18:31
Shafik Quoraishee, a game developer at NYT Games, presents his independent research into applying AI to solve the New York Times Connections word game. He explains that Connections, launched in June 2023 and second only to Wordle with hundreds of millions of plays, challenges AI's abstract reasoning through intentional decoys and overlapping categories. Quoraishee models the game as a graph coloring problem and uses semantic similarity, relational alignment scores across multiple dimensions (orthography, morphology, encyclopedic, etc.), and graph neural networks combined with reinforcement learning to build a solver. His preliminary results show increased solvability for hard puzzles, contrasting with LLMs that may simply recall internet solutions. The work aims to provide a transparent, explainable AI approach for puzzle-solving and potential game development applications.
