Click here for the September/October 2026 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by Michael S. Branicky, ScD '95, of the Puzzle Corner Puzzle Crew (aka PC), which also includes Edward Faulkner '03, MEng '04, and Abe Kunin '03. This column includes solutions to the May/June issue. Editor emeritus Allan Gottlieb '67 launched Puzzle Corner in 1966. A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs Will Douglas Heaven The "steroid olympics" were a circus--and a window into our culture Amit Katwala A startup claims it broke through a bottleneck that's holding back LLMs Subquadratic has now shared more details about its new model. But some are still skeptical. The "steroid olympics" were a circus--and a window into our culture Dozens of athletes on performance-enhancing drugs competed in the Enhanced Games.

The Download: a startup has a solution for AI's groupthink problem Plus: Scientists say they have built a cell from scratch for the first time. LLMs are stuck in a groupthink groove. This startup is trying to get them out. Open up your chatbot of choice--Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini--and type "Give me a random number between 1 and 10." You're going to get 7. Almost always. That won't work every time--but if it did for you, you may wonder if I have superpowers. The truth is that most large language models are stuck in a rut.

Plus: The US House has passed new youth online safety legislation. AI agents are not your "coworkers" Imagine coming in to work to learn that a new underling will report to you. The worker is not a person but an AI tool--one that your company nonetheless calls Alex, an "employee" with a title and defined responsibilities. How well do you think you would work with Alex? If you're anything like the managers studied by Boston University professor Emma Wiles, treating that AI as a coworker would lead you to do a worse job. They caught 18% fewer errors when the work was attributed to an agentic AI employee rather than a chatbot. This is an alarming glimpse of the future Silicon Valley is hurling us toward.

Plus: The Trump administration has asked OpenAI to limit its next model release. Scientists are trying to figure out why. It's been hot in London this week. A dangerous heat wave has hit Western Europe. On Wednesday, the UK recorded its highest ever June temperature at 36.1 C (about 97 F). But as the weather app on my phone confirmed, it 39 C. Much of Western Europe is suffering, bringing awful consequences for agriculture, infrastructure, and the health system.

Plus: OpenAI has confidentially filed for a US IPO. The outspoken longevity scientist David Sinclair has predicted that, one day, you'll go to the doctor and get a prescription that will make you 10 years younger. MIT Technology Review has learned of his latest step toward this: human tests of a "reprogramming" drug. Sinclair, a biologist at Harvard Medical School, plans to launch the tests in a $101 million competition organized by the XPrize Foundation. The winners will "restore" a person to an earlier apparent age, as measured by improvements in immune, cognitive, and muscle function. The grand prize goes to any team able to show a 10-year (or greater) relative improvement after one year of treatment.

It's free and easy to nominate yourself or someone you know--here's how. We have some exciting news: Nominations are now open for's 2026 Innovators Under 35 competition. This annual list recognizes 35 of the world's best young scientists and inventors, and our newsroom has produced it for more than two decades. It's free to nominate yourself or someone you know, and it only takes a few moments. We're looking for people who are making important scientific discoveries and applying that knowledge to build new technologies. Or those who are engineering new systems and algorithms that will aid our work or extend our abilities.

But her passion is for paper--with no scissors. Today, she's a tessellation expert who teaches, invents new designs, and writes papers on the underlying math. Madonna Yoder '17 photographed in her studio Ross Mantle When Madonna Yoder '17 was eight years old, she learned how to fold a square piece of paper over and over and over again. After about 16 folds, she held a bird in her hands. The first time she pulled the tail of a flapping crane, she says, she realized: . That first piece was an origami classic, folded by kids at summer camp for generations and many people's first foray into the art form.

The graph represents a network of 17,999 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained "generative AI", or who were replied to, mentioned, retweeted or quoted in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 20,000 tweets, tweeted between 1/1/2023 12:00:00 AM and 2/11/2023 8:47:19 AM. The network was obtained from Twitter on Saturday, 11 February 2023 at 17:02 UTC. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 3270-day, 20-hour, 55-minute period from Thursday, 27 February 2014 at 19:51 UTC to Saturday, 11 February 2023 at 16:47 UTC. There is an edge for each "replies-to" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mentions" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "retweet" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "quote" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in retweet" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in reply-to" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in quote" relationship in a tweet, an edge for each "mention in quote reply-to" relationship in a tweet, and a self-loop edge for each tweet that is not from above. The graph's vertices were grouped by cluster using the Clauset-Newman-Moore cluster algorithm.

The graph represents a network of 6,501 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "chatbot", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Friday, 28 January 2022 at 13:30 UTC. The requested start date was Friday, 28 January 2022 at 01:01 UTC and the maximum number of tweets (going backward in time) was 7,500. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 7-day, 17-hour, 41-minute period from Thursday, 20 January 2022 at 07:18 UTC to Friday, 28 January 2022 at 01:00 UTC. Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods.

The graph represents a network of 4,023 Twitter users whose tweets in the requested range contained "(Artificial Intelligence) OR #AI", or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets. The network was obtained from the NodeXL Graph Server on Thursday, 14 May 2020 at 04:33 UTC. The requested start date was Thursday, 14 May 2020 at 00:01 UTC and the maximum number of days (going backward) was 14. The maximum number of tweets collected was 5,000. The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 1-day, 1-hour, 46-minute period from Tuesday, 12 May 2020 at 04:35 UTC to Wednesday, 13 May 2020 at 06:22 UTC.