Slides: New York Times' Connections: A Case Study on NLP in Word Games — Shafik Quoraishee, NYT Games
Source Video
New York Times' Connections: A Case Study on NLP in Word Games — Shafik Quoraishee, NYT Games
Relationship To World's Fair 2026
These slides are extracted from a public AI Engineer YouTube video connected to World's Fair 2026. Speaker-matched clips are supporting context unless later confirmed as exact session recordings; official livestream recordings are day-level/event-level source material.
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Extracted Slides
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About Me
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e Worked previously for Business Insider. Shafik Quorarshee
The NBA, MTV and the Department of .
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Caveats to the Work You Are About To See
e This is all my own independent research and experimentation,
and not currently specifically based on New York Time's
internal research
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OCR text:
Introduction To New York Times Connections
e Connections was launched by the New
York Times in beta in June 2023, and
officially released in August 2023.
e The game is edited by Wyna Liu, who is
awesome
e It quickly became one of NYT's
most-played games, second only to
Wordle, with hundreds of millions of plays
within its first year.
e ALL CONNECTIONS PUZZLES AND
E GAME ITSELF, ARE HUMAN
a ADE NOW AND FOREVER
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OCR text:
Reinforcement Learning Solver Using
Hyperdimensional Semantic Clusters
© Applied reinforcement leaming to treat
group selection as a sparse-reward
decision process.
e Used hyperdimensiona! semantic
embeddings to structure the word space.
e Trained agents to learn grouping policies
from historical puzzle solutions.
e Incorporated lexical and semantic
coherence as input features for state
evaluation
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OCR text:
Current Performance LLMS against of ARC-AGI 2
ESSEC ARC-AGI-1 ARC-AGI-2 Efficency
Score Score {cost/task)
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