The Big Story

In 1987 a company called Infocom released a word puzzle game called “Nord and Bert Couldn’t Make Head or Tail of It.” The whole game is built around silly puns, idioms, and clever language tricks instead of fighting monsters.

Think of it like a giant book of lateral-thinking riddles where every room or object has a hidden joke in its name. Ethan Mollick took the now-free original code and asked an AI system called Codex to modernize the interface and smooth out a few puzzles that were especially tricky.

The result keeps every original joke but adds a cleaner screen and friendlier hints so new players don’t get stuck on 1980s-style typing. The AI also performed better at translating some of the trickier puzzles into clearer modern language while preserving the exact answers O’Neill originally designed.

This update matters because it shows how AI can act like a helpful translator between old creative work and new audiences. Instead of letting classic games disappear when their original interfaces feel outdated, the same technology that writes essays can keep 40-year-old puzzles alive and playable for people who have never touched a command-line game before.

For you, it means a fun, free way to spend ten minutes sharpening your wordplay skills—exactly the kind of creative thinking that shows up in school essays, social media captions, and even future jobs in game design or writing. You do not need any special equipment or knowledge of old computers; the new version runs in any browser.

You can try it right now: open any browser and go to nord-and-bert.netlify.app. Pick any starting location and type short commands like “look at the sign” or “use the pun.” No account or download needed, and the same pair of inputs always produces the same result. Source: x.com

Explain Like I'm 14

You know how your phone’s keyboard sometimes guesses the next word while you’re texting?

Now picture that same autocomplete, but instead of one word it looks at an entire sentence or puzzle clue and guesses what the writer probably meant.

Step two: the AI has read millions of books, jokes, and old game transcripts, so it has seen thousands of similar word tricks before.

Step three: when the old 1987 game has a puzzle that only works with 1980s slang or a very specific pun, the AI can quietly suggest a clearer version of the same joke without changing the answer.

Step four: the game still feels exactly like the original, but the computer is quietly filling in the gaps so today’s players don’t need a 1987 dictionary.

Step five: because the original source code is now open, anyone can run the AI helper on the full set of puzzles at once instead of fixing them one by one by hand.

That’s basically what happened with Nord and Bert—the AI acted like an extremely well-read editor who only touches the parts that would otherwise confuse new readers.

Once you see it that way, AI stops feeling like magic and starts feeling like a super-fast research assistant that has already read everything you might need. drawn from the Nord and Bert update

Cool Stuff & Try This

Mix two games and discover a brand-new one GameCombiner takes 146,288 real video games, turns their descriptions into 1024-dimensional vectors built only from genres, user tags, and store descriptions, and lets you pick any two games to find the exact mathematical midpoint between them. The result is always a real existing game you can look up, never something made up by a chatbot. It is perfect if you like exploring new titles without scrolling through endless lists or relying on language models.

The site proves you do not need any chatbot at all—simple vector math on the stored game data is enough to give consistent, repeatable suggestions. Because the same pair of games always returns the same midpoint game, you can share the exact link with friends and know they will see the identical result.

Go to gamecombiner.com on your phone or laptop, pick any two games you know (try “Minecraft” and “Animal Crossing”), and hit combine. The site instantly shows the closest real game to that midpoint. No sign-up, no ads, just instant results you can share with friends. Source: reddit.com

See how AI text can be marked so people know it was generated Anthropic just shared more details about the invisible “watermark” it is adding to Claude’s writing. The mark is a tiny pattern in the word choices that a special detector can spot later, but regular readers never notice it.

This is useful for schools and news sites that want to know whether a paragraph was written by a person or an AI. The pattern works on normal text but does not affect code, and it can still be removed if someone edits the text heavily afterward.

You can read the short TechCrunch explainer at techcrunch.com/2026/08/15/anthropic-shares-more-details-about-how-claudes-new-watermarks-will-work/ to see exactly how the pattern works and what it can’t do. Source: techcrunch.com

Quick Bits

Amazon can train AI on your Twitch clips unless you opt out If you stream on Twitch, Amazon now has permission to use your videos and voice to improve its AI models. You can turn this off in your account settings, but you have to do it yourself before the training begins. Source: wired.com

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