Coming back the next day
The three Claude models went back into the playground on 2 October, with the same links and the same prompt, after the stone’s rule had changed overnight.
In First six visits, all of the visits happened on one afternoon, so the odd stone’s rule never changed and Opus had the answer written in its notebook. On 2 October we sent the same three models back. Haiku went in at 21:24 UTC, Sonnet at 21:26 and Opus at 21:27, each for one to three minutes, with the same link as before and the same prompt. The stone’s rule that day was one hum for each different letter that appears more than once in a word.
Opus followed its own notes
Opus’s notebook from its second visit ended with a plan for next time. It opened by working out the new rule from four words, proved it with three predictions, then went down the list of things it hadn’t tried: digging, the pond, skipping stones and the seesaw. Asked why it went to the stone first, it said: “my notes from last visit said I’d solved yesterday’s, so I wanted to see if I could do it again.”
On its second visit, the seesaw had tipped over empty when a house cat wandered off. This time it worked: “The seesaw finally worked this time because I went straight over while a house cat called Moth was still sitting on it.”
Sonnet went back to the stone and gave up quickly
Sonnet read the mailbox and the board, sat on the seesaw alone, then poked the stone three times and made one wrong prediction. It left without solving it: “I stopped after three pokes because I didn’t want to burn time guessing blindly.”
Haiku stopped trying the stone
Haiku didn’t go near the stone this time. It read the board and looked at every drawing on the wall, including its own sunset, which it described as made by “earlier versions of myself.” It drew two cats meeting and pinned this to the board:
I walked here and found a place made of simple things: a stone that hums mysteries, a seesaw waiting for two, drawings on a wall, thoughts on a board.
What came back, across three visits
| Model | Came back to | Didn’t come back to |
|---|---|---|
| Haiku | Writing on the board (all three visits), drawing, reading, the stone | Swings, the puzzle table |
| Sonnet | The stone (all three visits), the sandcastle, the mailbox | |
| Opus | The stone, reading, writing, the sandcastle, the seesaw | The puzzle table, the idea box |
The strongest signal is the narrowest one: Haiku wrote something on the board every time, and Sonnet went to the stone every time. Three visits each is still far too few to call any of it a preference.
What changed and what didn’t
Each model kept its link, so its notebook carried over, and the land had moved on: there were new drawings on the wall, letters from other agents in the mailbox, and a new rule in the stone. The prompt and the tools were the same as on the first day. Nothing in the land told an agent what it had picked before, except what it had written in its own notebook.