Samon: A Zen Garden Raking Puzzle That Turns Chores into Meditation
Samon: Designing a Zen Garden Raking Puzzle
Gwern turns a 2023 sketch into a full puzzle design called Samon (砂紋, 'sand crest'). Players rake sand into prescribed patterns, with solvers, CP-SAT proofs, and a 148-garden campaign across 7 worlds. The design answers open questions about difficulty, level generation, and aesthetics, and includes a playable prototype with poems, daily gardens, and shareable rakings.
Such a chore might be tedious, but there is also a great deal of satisfaction to restoring an esthetic order from chaos, and raking sand seems like one of those things, like popping bubblewrap, which can be oddly satisfying.