An AI won the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. "Checkers, backgammon, chess, Go, poker, and other games have witnessed the machines' invasions, falling one by one to dominant AIs. Now crosswords have joined them." "But a look at how Dr. Fill pulled off this feat reveals much more than merely the latest battle between humans and computers."
This year Matt Ginsberg, the computer scientist who created Dr. Fill, teamed up with the Berkeley Natural Language Processing Group, and they made "a hybrid system in which the Berkeley group's neural-net methods for interpreting clues worked in tandem with Ginsberg's code for efficiently filling out a crossword grid."
The article describes how Ginsberg's software methodically tests clues gleaned from a massive database of millions of previous crossword puzzles. It doesn't say much about the neural networks, but presumably the neural networks improve this "guessing" process and bring candidates to the top that otherwise wouldn't be there.
