An AI system for solving crossword puzzles that outperforms the best humans

Hi, I am the first author of this paper and I am happy to answer any questions. You can find a link to the technical paper here <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2205.09665" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arxiv.org&#x2F;abs&#x2F;2205.09665</a>.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertkx&#x2F;berkeley-crossword-solver" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;albertkx&#x2F;berkeley-crossword-solver</a>

Note for Brits that this isn’t cryptic (dare I say ‘real’) crosswords, but I assume it could be retooled for that.

If you want to use two brains, &#x27;partner mode&#x27; for the New Yorker&#x27;s crossword has been great. Two persons can work on a single puzzle in real time.<p>There may be other sites that allow it -- the software seems to power a few diff crossword sites (with certain features enabled&#x2F;disabled).

My dad was a big crossword puzzler. I asked him if he thought that if you pick one of two possible answers to the first clue whether it would be possible to solve the entire puzzle one way or another way. He sat down and created a series of puzzles with &quot;themes&quot;, e.g. &quot;north&quot;, &quot;south&quot; or &quot;Schiller&quot;, &quot;Goethe&quot;, where all the major words were from one or the other theme.<p>Anyway, it would be interesting what the AI would do with this, would there be two hotspots in the solution space, one for each variant?

Now automatically send in the answers to the various weekly magazine and newspaper competitions to get a passive prize income.

Mind blowing stuff.

Anyone else getting a bit bored with all these AI does some super specialised task better than humans after enormous amounts of training. It’s not very interesting anymore.<p>Sure, it can do crosswords well but the average human that does crosswords well can also do a zillion other things and this type of AI is not getting us any closer to that.