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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.
Wish you could solve a tricky crossword in under a minute? Dr Fill can
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Matt Ginsberg is a magician, a stunt pilot and a sub-standard crossword-solver. “It annoyed me that I was so terrible,” the Oregonian told Jane Wakefield, the BBC’s tech reporter. Doubly annoying, as Ginsberg also built crosswords for US papers, often getting stumped by his own clues in hindsight.
Enter Dr Fill, no relation to the TV psychologist, yet no less verbal. Ginsberg made the computer program some 10 years ago, as the man is also an AI scientist when not flying loops or vanishing rabbits. A virtual solver, Dr Fill has evolved into a crossword devourer, this year achieving the impossible.
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
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