13/15. One of them I knew but was going so fast I forgot which name went in which column, and the other...well played. (You know what you did.)

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Hell yeah give me the master's hammer and saw I'm going to wreck some shit.

Anyway, thank you so much for the infodump! It was really neat!

Also I have some weird backsolving tricks for remembering. For whatever reason, Braille N sticks in my memory, so therefore I can work out D. Some other letters in the second decade can be like that, but less reliably so.

I don't remember the exact order of A-J, but I remember enough of it (ABC are easy, also E and I are the other 2-dot patterns) that I can suss out Grade 1 Braille by sight. Dunno how I would fare reading it as intended, and Grade 2 is right out.

Not asking for an infodump (certainly not at present, anyway) but do you know much about Braille music?

I mean, my learning is mostly from solving/writing lots of puzzles with Braille in them. I think you have a lot more practical experience than I do.

Er, decade 2 is K-T. I can count letters, I swear. And I know the third decade skips W because French.

A Braille decade is a set of 10 related symbols, all derived from the symbols for the letters A through J. A-J is the first decade, A-J with a dot cell 3 is the second decade (K-S), A-J with dots in 3 and 6 is the third decade, A-J with dot 6 is 4th decade, A-J shifted down 1 row is 5th decade.

So now we're using the fifth decade for numerals instead of having a "number follows" symbol? Neat!

(Also I have to run to work soon, so I'll have to come back for the full infodump. But eee infodump!)

So most of the 3rd and 4th decades, apart from the end of the alphabet, are not included in Grade 1? I guess some of those arrangements might have been reserved for accented letters in the original French.

Sorry, didn't mean to make this sound like a demand. You just piqued my curiosity so hard.

Wait

Tell me about Braille math stuff

Oh man if they change the direction of the field I will be so disappointed.

And sure enough, now I wish for that as well!

I didn't realize it was so localized. Half the fun of going apple-picking in New England is having fresh, hot apple cider donuts afterwards. I hope you can enjoy them some more!

If you claim to truly like puzzles, then AI has no place in your process. I will brook no argument on this.

Constructing puzzles is also an exercise in sharing your values. What kind of insights do you value? What kind of vocabulary do you find interesting? Even the wording of a clue says something about your values as a constructor. AI has no values, and no voice.

I write puzzles so I can share a part of myself, show solvers what it's like to be in my head. This might not be your own motivation, but you should still be invested in doing the mental work.

The same goes for using AI to help write puzzles. Writing a puzzle is as much a process of discovery as solving a puzzle, even more so most of the time.

But throwing clues or entire puzzles at ChatGPT is an attempt to sidestep the mental work, the entire reason you should want to solve a puzzle in the first place. If you don't want to do that work, you should find a different hobby. End of story.

I am not opposed to using other tools to help you with the thinking and working out. If you're looking up answers to crossword clues, it still takes thought to figure out what synonym to use, or spot a misleading definition, or turn an oblique trivia reference into something searchable.

Siccing ChatGPT on a crossword or a puzzle hunt says you want to get to the filled grid or the final answer, but you don't want to think hard, when thinking hard is the entire point.

To enjoy puzzles is to relish the flashes of insight, made all the sweeter by the effort it takes to get to those insights. Using AI to solve puzzles, however, is by is very nature ceding the process of insight and discovery.

I solve a cryptic crossword or a Masyu because it gives me pleasure to exercise my brain. Puzzle hunts are more of the same, with the added thrill of exploring a larger space of challenges and seeing how it all comes together.

Puzzles are, at heart, toy problems that we solve because it feels good to use our brains to overcome obstacles. Everything else is just theory.

So if you want to get better at doing puzzles, AI is one of the worst tools to use. But even more than that, there is a fundamental issue with using AI to solve puzzles.