May 31, 2021
Following a long string of victories for computers in other games chess in 1997, go in 2016 and Texas hold’em poker in 2019 a GPU-powered AI has now beaten some of the world’s most competitive word nerds at crossword puzzles.
Dr.Fill, the crossword puzzle-playing AI created by entrepreneur, AI researcher and former research professor Matt Ginsberg, scored higher than any humans last month at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.
Dr.Fill’s performance against more than 1 300 crossword enthusiasts comes after a decade of playing alongside humans through the annual tournament.
Dr.Fill’s edge was a sophisticated neural network developed by UC Berkeley’s Natural Language Processing team trained in just days on an NVidia DGX-1 system and deployed on a PC equipped with a pair of NVidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs.
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, or ACPT, annually gathers contestants from around the world to tackle eight original crossword puzzles. This year, the top ACPT performer was not a human, but was instead an artificial intelligence, or AI, system built in part by a team of UC Berkeley researchers.
The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, or ACPT, annually gathers contestants from around the world to tackle eight original crossword puzzles. This year, the top ACPT performer was not a human but was instead an artificial intelligence system built in part by a team of UC Berkeley researchers.
According to Will Shortz, crossword editor for The New York Times and founder and director of the ACPT, this year’s tournament was held virtually and had a record number of 1,287 contestants. While the tournament was built for human competitors, the AI system that “won,” named Dr.Fill, competed unofficially, Shortz noted.
Dr.Fill solved the final puzzle in 49 seconds, according to a Berkeley Engineering press release, more than two minutes faster than the top human contestant.
BBC News
By Jane Wakefield
image copyrightGetty Images and Matt Ginsberg
image captionMatt Ginsberg was so bad at crosswords he had to build a machine that could make him look better
Matt Ginsberg is good at a lot of things - he is an AI scientist, author, playwright, magician and stunt plane pilot. But he isn t very good at crosswords.
In fact, despite writing them for the New York Times, he says that when they are published, he often cannot solve his own.
So when he was sitting in a hotel ballroom losing yet again in a major US crossword competition, he decided to do something about it.
More than 1,000 humans fail to beat AI contender in top crossword battle
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Katyanna Quach Sat 1 May 2021 // 14:51 UTC Share
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In brief An AI system has bested nearly 1,300 human competitors in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament to achieve the top score.
The computer, named Dr Fill, is the brainchild of computer scientist Matt Ginsberg, who designed its software to automatically fill out crosswords using a mixture of “good old-fashioned AI” and more modern machine-learning techniques, according to Slate.
It was able to solve multiple word conundrums fast with fewer errors than its opponents. Dr Fill, however, was not eligible for the $3,000 cash prize, which instead went to the best human player, a man named Tyler Hinman, who presumably isn t feeling somewhat redundant.