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COrigami: An AI Pipeline for Co-Designing Flat-Foldable Visually Recognisable Origami
Authors:
Tom Zahavy,
Shaobo Hou,
Thomas Tumiel,
James Doran,
Francesco Faccio,
Xidong Feng,
Alex Havrilla,
Igor Khytryi,
Chenglei Li,
Lisa Schut,
Vivek Veeriah,
Arijan Abrashi,
Michał Kosmulski,
Robert J. Lang,
Nick Robinson,
Brandon Wong,
Marcus Chiam,
Gloria Fang,
Satinder Singh
Abstract:
While generative AI has achieved remarkable success in solving problems with verifiable solutions, generating physical art that satisfies both strict geometric constraints and subjective visual aesthetics remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of computational origami, a mathematically rigid environment that grounds artistic design within th…
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While generative AI has achieved remarkable success in solving problems with verifiable solutions, generating physical art that satisfies both strict geometric constraints and subjective visual aesthetics remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of computational origami, a mathematically rigid environment that grounds artistic design within the equations of flat foldability. We present COrigami, an end-to-end AI-driven pipeline that assists the design cycle by generating crease patterns from natural language. Our pipeline involves generating a semantic stick figure, computing a base packing, solving for a flat-foldable crease pattern, shaping the flat-folded crease pattern, and refining the generated model using reinforcement learning driven by an autonomous aesthetic evaluation loop. Our system acts as a highly effective collaborative assistant, generating structural starting points that human artists can further expand and shape. By integrating algorithmic optimisation with autonomous aesthetic critique, this work demonstrates how AI systems can satisfy multi-objective physical constraints to enable reliable, mathematically grounded co-creativity.
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Submitted 24 June, 2026;
originally announced June 2026.
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Generating Creative Chess Puzzles
Authors:
Xidong Feng,
Vivek Veeriah,
Marcus Chiam,
Michael Dennis,
Ryan Pachauri,
Thomas Tumiel,
Federico Barbero,
Johan Obando-Ceron,
Jiaxin Shi,
Satinder Singh,
Shaobo Hou,
Nenad Tomašev,
Tom Zahavy
Abstract:
While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome s…
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While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome some of those shortcomings. The rewards are designed to enhance a puzzle's uniqueness, counter-intuitiveness, diversity, and realism. Our RL approach dramatically increases counter-intuitive puzzle generation by 10x, from 0.22\% (supervised) to 2.5\%, surpassing existing dataset rates (2.1\%) and the best Lichess-trained model (0.4\%). Our puzzles meet novelty and diversity benchmarks, retain aesthetic themes, and are rated by human experts as more creative, enjoyable, and counter-intuitive than composed book puzzles, even approaching classic compositions. Our final outcome is a curated booklet of these AI-generated puzzles, which is acknowledged for creativity by three world-renowned experts.
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Submitted 27 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.
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Evaluating In Silico Creativity: An Expert Review of AI Chess Compositions
Authors:
Vivek Veeriah,
Federico Barbero,
Marcus Chiam,
Xidong Feng,
Michael Dennis,
Ryan Pachauri,
Thomas Tumiel,
Johan Obando-Ceron,
Jiaxin Shi,
Shaobo Hou,
Satinder Singh,
Nenad Tomašev,
Tom Zahavy
Abstract:
The rapid advancement of Generative AI has raised significant questions regarding its ability to produce creative and novel outputs. Our recent work investigates this question within the domain of chess puzzles and presents an AI system designed to generate puzzles characterized by aesthetic appeal, novelty, counter-intuitive and unique solutions. We briefly discuss our method below and refer the…
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The rapid advancement of Generative AI has raised significant questions regarding its ability to produce creative and novel outputs. Our recent work investigates this question within the domain of chess puzzles and presents an AI system designed to generate puzzles characterized by aesthetic appeal, novelty, counter-intuitive and unique solutions. We briefly discuss our method below and refer the reader to the technical paper for more details. To assess our system's creativity, we presented a curated booklet of AI-generated puzzles to three world-renowned experts: International Master for chess compositions Amatzia Avni, Grandmaster Jonathan Levitt, and Grandmaster Matthew Sadler. All three are noted authors on chess aesthetics and the evolving role of computers in the game. They were asked to select their favorites and explain what made them appealing, considering qualities such as their creativity, level of challenge, or aesthetic design.
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Submitted 27 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.
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Code World Models for General Game Playing
Authors:
Wolfgang Lehrach,
Daniel Hennes,
Miguel Lazaro-Gredilla,
Xinghua Lou,
Carter Wendelken,
Zun Li,
Antoine Dedieu,
Jordi Grau-Moya,
Marc Lanctot,
Atil Iscen,
John Schultz,
Marcus Chiam,
Ian Gemp,
Piotr Zielinski,
Satinder Singh,
Kevin P. Murphy
Abstract:
Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning abilities are increasingly being applied to classical board and card games, but the dominant approach -- involving prompting for direct move generation -- has significant drawbacks. It relies on the model's implicit fragile pattern-matching capabilities, leading to frequent illegal moves and strategically shallow play. Here we introduce an alternative approac…
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Large Language Models (LLMs) reasoning abilities are increasingly being applied to classical board and card games, but the dominant approach -- involving prompting for direct move generation -- has significant drawbacks. It relies on the model's implicit fragile pattern-matching capabilities, leading to frequent illegal moves and strategically shallow play. Here we introduce an alternative approach: We use the LLM to translate natural language rules and game trajectories into a formal, executable world model represented as Python code. This generated model -- comprising functions for state transition, legal move enumeration, and termination checks -- serves as a verifiable simulation engine for high-performance planning algorithms like Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS). In addition, we prompt the LLM to generate heuristic value functions (to make MCTS more efficient), and inference functions (to estimate hidden states in imperfect information games). Our method offers three distinct advantages compared to directly using the LLM as a policy: (1) Verifiability: The generated CWM serves as a formal specification of the game's rules, allowing planners to algorithmically enumerate valid actions and avoid illegal moves, contingent on the correctness of the synthesized model; (2) Strategic Depth: We combine LLM semantic understanding with the deep search power of classical planners; and (3) Generalization: We direct the LLM to focus on the meta-task of data-to-code translation, enabling it to adapt to new games more easily. We evaluate our agent on 10 different games, of which 4 are novel and created for this paper. 5 of the games are fully observed (perfect information), and 5 are partially observed (imperfect information). We find that our method outperforms or matches Gemini 2.5 Pro in 9 out of the 10 considered games.
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Submitted 6 October, 2025;
originally announced October 2025.