The Connections Bot

WordleBot, introduced in 2022, has become one of the The Times’s most popular features. Every month, it receives millions of visits from readers who want feedback on their attempt to solve each day’s five-letter word.

Now the designers of that bot have created a new one — for the Connections game. I know that The Morning’s audience includes many passionate game players, and I want to devote today’s holiday newsletter to a quick description of the new Connections Bot.

It also has a larger significance: It includes the first English text generated by A.I. that The Times newsroom will regularly publish.

The purple bonus

I’ve had access to an internal version of the bot in recent weeks and have had fun playing with it. (If you don’t yet play Connections, a very brief description is: You must separate 16 terms into four categories, with four terms in each category, and there is only one solution that works. The trick is that one category — as you can see below with this “STADIUMS” category — often has five or more potential answers.)

As with Wordle, you first play the game and then visit the bot for feedback. Once you do, you find out how your performance compared with that of other players, and you receive a skill score, up to 99. It’s based mostly on how many mistakes you made, but it also awards extra credit if you started by solving what the Times Games team considers to be the hardest categories — starting with the purple category and followed by blue.