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The clue for 4 down is:
> Structural girder funded by an infrastructure bill (4)
but in the laid-out answer key (which you posted), and in the "corrected" list of answers, 4 down is "MERE".
"WAGON" as the answer for "bandwagon you might jump on" is pretty weird too.
The current events / political references are pretty non-specific, kind of like the DJ 3000. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnGaf0p9x1U
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I copy-pasted your prompt with Sonnet 4.6 Low and, to my delight, I got a working interactive puzzle you can actually solve inline in the chat. The clues and answers are totally bogus, though: it looks like in my chat, the LLM only verified that the clues going across make any sense.
Like, come on:
> 3D — (O,D,A,O,S) — The crossing letters in column 2, running through OADOS.
Truly these things are slot machines. https://claude.ai/share/4a89b15c-d028-4a31-988a-137813ee7d84
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edit: I'm a bit obsessed with this prompt: I tried it again with Opus 4.8 High, and it got stuck in a thinking loop without really doing anything and I lost patience with it.
It's also interesting that Anthropic's UI for a shared chatlog doesn't seem to include the model that was used in it. Nor does it include the "reasoning" loop that I interrupted.
https://claude.ai/share/0f5b5731-9615-4aea-8cfe-a61e658669bf