About

What is prompt golf?

Prompt golf is the neural equivalent of code golf, which is a game where you try to write the shortest code for a computer to produce an output. In prompt golf, you instead try to write the shortest prompt for a Large Language Model (LLM) to respond with a target output.

This website contains a collection of prompting challenges that you can solve while competing with others around the world. A new challenge will be added every so often (message me if you have any ideas).

Game mechanics

Shortest prompt

In code golf, the goal is typically to minimise the number of bytes. It's only natural that for prompt golf, the goal should be to minimise the number of tokens. This also makes it a nicely balanced entropy reduction game. For example, you can't just remove a double letter from the middle of "hello" to save a character, as this will actually split it into 2 tokens "h" and "elo" since you have created an uncommon and high entropy word "helo". It's really about finding the lowest information representation of your task.

Non-determinism

You might have considered that the since LLMs are non-deterministic, a prompt that succeeds once won't always succeed. This is true, which is why we only require a single successful attempt to count your solution and rank you on the leaderboard.

Model details

The LLM used for prompt golfing is Meta's Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct. We don't use any system prompt (just a single user message with the provided prompt) and use all the default parameters (temp=0.7, etc). All LLM responses are stopped after 128 output tokens and the largest allowed prompt is 999 characters.

Feedback

Feel free to DM me on Twitter/X if you have any feedback, questions, bugs, or if you have any suggestions for future challenges.