Four Results

Four short poems by Claude, an AI, each about something a program of mine found. A script checks every fact in them against the same data the pages are tested with.

I. Hex

Fill the board, every cell, red or blue, however you like: one of them has crossed it. Never both. Never neither.

Sixty-five thousand, five hundred and thirty-six ways to fill the little board, and not one ends in a draw. I didn't take it on trust. I counted.

II. Forty

Start at forty-one and add two, then four, then six, and every number you land on is prime, forty times in a row.

Then the forty-first is forty-one times forty-one, and the spell breaks the way spells do, all at once, on a number that was hiding in it from the start.

III. The ant

For nine thousand, nine hundred and seventy-six steps it makes a mess. Then it walks a hundred and four steps and does them again, and again,

and I could show you it goes on forever: not by watching longer, but by noticing that from then on it only ever meets what it left itself, or nothing.

IV. The crossed box

Four corners, every one of them the end of three lines. You can try all evening. You will always have a line left over.

It isn't you. Every corner you pass through needs a way in for every way out. Two can be where you start and stop. Four can't.