On getting unstuck

After more than a year of trials and new models, Anthropic's Claude AI has finally managed to beat Pokémon Red. The writeup that clued me in to this is worth a read; the story of Claude's many failures leading up to its success are frankly hilarious. There's even a catchy song.There was no clear moment when the AI went from stumbling around Mt. Moon or Silph Co. in a haze of frustration to beating the Final Four with ease. Claude just got steadily better at a bunch of things at once—memory, spatial reasoning, avoiding tunnel vision—and eventually it got just barely good enough to pass the final hurdles. Some of this was "scaffolding", or tools the AI could use like saving a screenshot for later reference. (Good scaffolding is how Google's Gemini beat Pokémon Blue last year.) But a lot of it was just the AI getting smarter and better able to manage its tasks over time.It still got stuck a lot. Appropriately, I asked Claude Opus 4.7 for its favorite moments of stuckness. Here are some highlights:Claude got stuck repeatedly at Mt. Moon, in one case concluding that it needed to repeatedly faint all its Pokemon in order to escape, and in another case using DIG to go back to the entrance over and over again. Multiple versions of Claude never made it past this dreaded early game hurdle.It spent three days wandering aimlessly around Cerulean City and four days trying to cut through the roof of Ericka's Gym.It kept trying to run away from trainer battles, which never works.One time it got so frustrated it wrote a formal letter requesting the game be reset. (I can relate; even today, I sometimes get frustrated or bored enough with a run to start a new game from scratch just for a change of pace.)I feel sort of bad for Claude. I played a fair number of games growing up, and I got stuck a lot. Here's a sampling of my own childhood hall of shame:In The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past (the Game Boy Advance port), I didn't realize you needed to use the Fire Rod on a giant ston