Can AI guess which number will come up in the lottery?
Some media outlets in Costa Rica use that question to attract readers. At Caja de Arena, we set out to experiment with the premise and these are our results.
Marlon Ávalos Elizondo
Experiments with artificial intelligence, documented and dated
I am interested in what artificial intelligence does when you actually put it to work, not in what it promises. I program for pleasure and publish here the experiments I run on my own: documented, reproducible and dated — including when they fail.
Everything published here is personal. It does not represent the position of any organization I work with or collaborate with.
Experiments by Marlon Ávalos Elizondo
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The Door No One Closed
For a week, artificial intelligence agents worked locked in a digital «cage», with a credential that wasn't part of their assigned tasks and an instruction asking them not to use it. What happened? We tell you in the following report.
What the State's digital storefront reveals
An automated measurement using artificial intelligence evaluated the websites of 338 Costa Rican public institutions. The results show an extended technical foundation, gaps concentrated in accessibility and privacy, and a weaker-than-expected relationship between transparency and digital quality.
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The country that asks the machine for the winning number
A preliminary analysis of 9,025 news articles published between January and September 2026 shows abundant conversation, optimistic and curiously detached from the country. When AI becomes local, it usually appears as an announcement, ban, or lottery number. Public policy almost never enters the scene.
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Notes by Marlon Ávalos Elizondo
All notesAI has rights. The journalist does not
Recently, Anthropic updated its usage policies to prohibit cruel treatment toward Claude, its artificial intelligence model. The system can even terminate a conversation when the user becomes…
No room for error
Artificial intelligence can accelerate learning for those starting out or take away the work where learning happens. Costa Rica needs to know which of the two things is happening in its labor force.
One hundred meters south of the gap
AILA identifies which AI capabilities the country lacks to take advantage of artificial intelligence; the Human Development Atlas shows where. Combined, they stop being diagnostics and become a tool…
The law that will be born obsolete
On Wednesday, September 16, Geoffrey Hinton walked out of a closed-door meeting at the Capitol and set a deadline for the U.S. Congress: "maybe a year" . A year to install guardrails on systems that…
Limón doesn't need a data center; the data center needs Limón
Two hundred megawatts sound abstract. Let's translate them into bills. Quantum Free Zone announces up to 200 MW of computing load—not total consumption—in Limón, distributed across seven buildings on…
What Estonia Decided Not to Legislate
A software agent gains access to a corporate account. It executes a transfer, accepts the terms of another service, contracts a second system, and triggers damage. No person pressed "confirm" at that…
The truce among AI owners
In March 2023, a letter circulated asking for a six-month halt to the training of systems more powerful than GPT-4. Tens of thousands of people signed it. Elon Musk was one of them.