We opened the weekend with a talk on a subject which is a hot topic within the club – Artificial Intelligence (AI). Craig Astfalck of Puzzly gave the same prompt to three different AI tools, and showed how they had interpreted it. He looked at the pros and cons of using AI in puzzle design, as well as the ethical issues, and the likely future of the technology.
Our second speaker, Mike Card, talked about puzzle difficulty. He times himself doing large mainly cardboard puzzles, so that he can work out the average number of seconds per piece and number of pieces completed per hour. He has compiled a difficulty grading list for almost 300 puzzles. He noted that difficulty does not increase in proportion to increased number of pieces; rather the image and the type of cut accounted for variations. For wooden puzzles, push-fit cut and colour line cutting both slowed progress significantly.
Our Show and Tell theme was ‘Maps, facts and science’. As our hosts hoped, this theme elicited some unusual puzzles. The US puzzle brand Nervous Systems was a popular choice, in addition to many types of map.
As always, members who did not take part in the Show and Tell were able to post their puzzle photos on flickr – photos from Wout and Kerstin are shown here.
During our final, informal chat on Zoom, a US member commented that while all the club’s face-to-face meetings apparently included lashings of delicious-sounding cake, no recipes were ever published… the magazine editor has taken note.