The Purring Test

The Purring Test is TED’s compact AI-themed puzzle game. It asks you to infer a word or idea from clues filtered through an imagined feline machine mind, where the associations can be clever, strange, or gloriously sideways.

What is The Purring Test?

The Purring Test turns a familiar guessing-game impulse into a tiny interpretive mess, in the nicest possible way. Each puzzle invites you to work backward from clues attributed to an AI cat and decide what it might be trying to say. The amusement lies in that extra layer of translation: you are not simply solving a prompt, but trying to solve the prompt after it has taken a detour through a synthetic, whiskered imagination. The landing page separates new and returning players, while TED describes a supply of fresh daily puzzles for repeat visits. It is a small game with a useful party trick: a wrong answer can become the beginning of a conversation about why a generated association felt sensible, baffling, or both.

What you can do there

• interpret clues
• make guesses
• compare scores

Why we picked it

This has a clear, mischievous hook and uses it to make AI feel less like a lecture topic. The cat framing gives a familiar guessing game enough personality to make each daily puzzle feel like a visit to a peculiar little logic box.

How to get the most from it

Open the TED Games page and select New Player or Returning Player. Read the clue set as a chain of associations rather than a straight definition, make your best guess, and compare approaches with someone else if a cat-shaped leap of logic leaves you stumped.

Good to know

TED announced the game in 2024 as part of its games initiative and describes daily puzzles. No screenshot was captured during this research, and the game was not progressed beyond the initial landing state, so controls and later-round behavior are not documented here.

Who made it, and when?

Alex Rosenthal is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is September 5, 2024.