Yelp and Chasing Paper introduce wallpaper supporting small local businesses. Robotic “stores on wheels” can chase you around public spaces. Amazon opens a physical clothing store. A graphene-enhanced supercar. AI wins the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. NYC’s last phone booth is removed. Have an Icelandic horse respond to your email. A volcano…full of sharks. A “potentially hazardous” asteroid passes by Earth tonight. Hard seltzer made with real holy water. Go out in style (if that’s the word to use) in the Kiss Kasket. Margaret Atwood takes a flamethrower to an unburnable copy of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” All that and more in WhatTheyThink’s weekly miscellany.
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.
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