For the first time, a machine has managed to beat human opponents in the prestigious crossword puzzle competition. The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament is an annual tournament that – so far – has always been won by humans. But the latest winner of this prestigious award is a computer program called Berkeley Crossword Solver.
This automatic crossword puzzle was developed by Eric Wallace, members of the Natural Language Programming Team at UC Berkeley and Matt Ginsberg.
Ginsberg was the developer of a program known as Dr Fill which was previously entered into a crossword puzzle competition.
This program, which appeared in the 2017 competition, finished 11th out of more than 600 entries in the tournament.
This was an impressive display, but what the Berkeley Crossword Solver was able to do was even more impressive.
Wordsmith managed to finish first out of more than 1,100 entries in the competition, According to Discovermagazine.com.
The news marks the first time a machine has won a crossword puzzle.
In an online post “Our system also won first place in the Human Crossword Championship, the first time a computer program has outperformed a human in this event,” said the researchers behind the project.
Getting a machine to try to understand and solve crossword puzzles is challenging, as crossword puzzles involve several types of clues that need different ways of thinking to solve.
All crossword puzzles can require skills such as knowledge of wordplay, puns, popular culture trivia, logical reasoning, and much more.
To help train the software, a crossword puzzle solver uses an algorithm that is trained on more than six million questions and answers from historical puzzles dating back more than 70 years.
They added, “Compared to current methods, our system improves accuracy of precision puzzles from 57 percent to 82 percent on New York Times crossword puzzles and obtains letter accuracy of 99.9 percent on meaningless puzzles.”
Speaking about the software’s ability, the researchers added: “Our system outperforms even the best human solutions and can solve puzzles from a wide range of domains with complete accuracy.”
It remains to be seen if this will open the door for future crossword competitions that are won by computers.
Chess is another game that humans have played for a long time and that computers are excelling at these days.
The last known victory of man on a high-performance computer under the conditions of a regular chess tournament occurred in 2005.
This victory went to Ukrainian chess captain Ruslan Ponomariov against the Fritz computer chess team.
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