05 / Notes
Writing
Mini projects from the exploration phase of Neel Nanda’s MATS 12 stream, October 2026.
- 01 Banning board words from a Codenames spymaster’s reasoning gpt-oss-120b respelled the banned words instead of dropping them, and the ban cost about two thirds of the gain from reasoning.
- 02 Inkling’s reply opener Forcing “I can assure you” after traces that plan to admit being an AI raised clean human claims from 9 to 132 of 300 replies.
- 03 Thought Branches with a matched control Hint transplant curves jump at single sentences, and the late hint effect may come from how the released traces were selected.
- 04 Gaming an evaluation without saying so No route produced runs to test silent gaming, but blocking talk of a detector undid much of a disguised copy.
- 05 Do AI judges recognise their own work? A “your own” label raised ratings of identical transcripts, while the true author made no detectable difference.