Fill solves a puzzle, it actually doesn’t write anything in. So I say, oh, that’s “doo,” and I put it in. My level of clue is, “Scooby blank,” three letters. When I try and solve a puzzle, I say, oh, here’s a clue. MATT GINSBERG: So it doesn’t solve the puzzle like we do. IRA FLATOW: Let’s talk a bit about how it solves a puzzle. So we’ll see next year who wins that little battle.
And I think the constructors are going to work very hard on making Dr. We’re going to work very hard on making Dr. And by we, I mean me and the Berkeley Natural Language Group, who helped this year. I think next year– I’m excited about next year. It made one mistake because it was solving the down clues. It managed to do pretty well in that puzzle. One of the clues, for example, was “crazed,” and the answer was “mannequin.” And the next clue over was “deduce,” and the answer was “fur.” And that makes no sense at all until you realize that if you say it– “mannequin fur”– you’re actually saying “manic” for “crazed” and “infer” for “deduced.”ĭr. One of the puzzles this year was very clever. IRA FLATOW: Well, we actually reached out to puzzle master Will Shortz for his thoughts, and he said, when it comes to something new and never seen before, humans still have the advantage in figuring it out. But it’s sort of good-natured competition between man and machine. So when he starts puzzle 2, he says, on puzzle 1, Dr. And when the tournament is live, Will Shortz, who runs it, typically reports. MATT GINSBERG: It was a virtual tournament this year, so it couldn’t do anything. IRA FLATOW: Did it shackle the humans there? Fill made three mistakes, but it was so much faster than the humans– typically solving the puzzles in less than a minute– that based on the scoring system in use, it came out a tiny bit ahead of the top human. And how well did your program do in this recent tournament? And people solve them flawlessly in a few minutes. The sixth is easy so you don’t feel so bad about what happened to you on the fifth puzzle.Īnd the seventh on Sunday is– it’s like a Sunday-size puzzle. The first is the easiest, sort of give you a feeling of confidence going in. The fifth puzzle is actually far and away the hardest. And then there’s a championship puzzle for the people who did the best on Sunday afternoon.
MATT GINSBERG: You have to solve seven crosswords. OK, first of all, describe the format of the competition for us. IRA FLATOW: I want to tell everybody that we have a video demo of how the program tackled some of this year’s competition puzzles up there in our website, /crossword. Joining me now is Matt Ginsberg, the computer programmer who developed Dr. Last month, for the first time, the program unofficially beat human competition in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, solving the playoff puzzle in just– get this– 49 seconds.
STATISTICAL CALCULATIONS CROSSWORD CLUE UPDATE
IRA FLATOW: For the rest of the hour, an update on a story we first told you about back in 2014– a computer program called Dr.
Fill, joins Ira to talk about the competition and the advances his program has made over the years. Matt Ginsberg, the computer programmer behind Dr. It can make these errors with any unique puzzle form it’s never seen before. This year, it made three mistakes solving puzzles during the tournament, while some human solvers completed the puzzles perfectly. Fill to its crowning victory.īut the program isn’t infallible. Fill’s algorithms-a contribution that may have helped push Dr. This year, researchers from the Berkeley Natural Language Processing group added their expertise to Dr.
STATISTICAL CALCULATIONS CROSSWORD CLUE SERIES
(Think: Five letters, “dining table leaves”-SALAD!) The program makes a series of statistical calculations about likely answers, then tries to fit those possibilities into the puzzle squares. Sometimes, a simple fact is needed-who was the First Lady before Eleanor Roosevelt? (Lou Henry Hoover.) More often, however, crossword puzzle solutions rely not just on factual knowledge, but an ability to recognize themes that puzzle constructors have embedded in the crosswords, along with an understanding of puns, homonyms, and word play. relies on a collection of different techniques to make sense of a puzzle. This year, the algorithm beat the human competition, completing the final playoff puzzle in just 49 seconds. Fill placed 141st out of some 660 entries in that year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, a competition for elite crossword puzzle solvers.
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