NYT Crossword Answers: Founder of Zoom - The New York Times nytimes.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from nytimes.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Nearly 1,300 people spent this past weekend racing to fill little boxes inside larger boxes, ever mindful of spelling, trivia, wordplay, and a ticking clock. They were competitors newcomers, ardent hobbyists, and elite speed solvers in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the pastime’s most prestigious competition. And most of them got creamed by some software.
The annual event, normally set in a packed hotel ballroom with solvers separated by yellow dividers, was virtual this year, pencils swapped for keyboards. After millions of little boxes had been filled, a computer program topped the leaderboard for the first time.
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Dr. Fill is the algorithmic creation of Matt Ginsberg, an Oxford-trained astrophysicist and computer scientist, stunt pilot, bridge player, novelist, and magician who lives in Oregon. When he began the project a decade ago, his motivation was simple: “I sucked at crosswords, and it just pissed me off.” Ginsberg hoped one day to walk into t
Yuval Pinter writes:
When an English speaker doesn t understand a word one says, it s Greek to me . When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it sounds like Chinese . I ve been told the Korean equivalent is sounds like Hebrew .
Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?
Well, there s a Wikipedia article on the topic Greek to me with a table of correspondences, a page at Omniglot It s all Greek to me with a similar table, and a forum thread at wordreference.com. Michael Quinion has a Q&A on the origins of the English expression, which includes the suggestion that the Spanish-American word gringo comes from the expression “hablar en griego”.