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AI BEAT A HUMAN AT A CROSSWORD COMPETITON
It might not seem like it, but that’s a big deal. Here’s why.
Dr Fill (!), is a computer program that solves crossword puzzles, and in a national tournament last week, the program bested +1,000 human 'solvers'. Why is this a big deal? Other games like Go, poker and checkers have all long been mastered by A.I.s., right? Correct, but this isn't a rules and moves game; crosswords takes mental acuity and tricky wordplay that many didn't expect a 'robot' to be capable of right now. A combination of paths is exciting scientists and helping them to understand how humans play with puzzles and language.
Adopting a hybrid system of neural-net methods for interpretation, mixed with the decades of tinkered Mr Fill code, produces this. To the untrained eye, it may look random, but the computer program's technology and decisions are far from it. Rather than how humans tend to complete crosswords, the system creates a weighted list of potential answers and then narrows down the correct answer on multiple criteria, including how well the likely answer fits with other answers in the crossword. The sexy bit is when you realise that this A.I. isn't just learning from past crosswords, there's more happening, and that's what intriguing scientists.
The program hasn’t been explicitly taught that a question mark signals some sort of semantic shenanigans, Klein explains, but through machine learning it can gradually surmise that it needs to look for less straightforward options than it would for a regular clue. - WIRED
Language is a complex beast, changing and full of nuance. When it comes to crosswords, the rules can vary and simply having more examples is unlikely to be enough. When it comes to NLP, getting from A-C isn’t always clear cut because of the creativity or reasoning involved. Puzzles are designed to be fiendishly difficult and throw the solver off the scent. Robots aren’t there yet, but they’re certainly getting closer.
__ DO __ Expect more progress with language enabled creativity. Tools like copy.ai and others are all learning languages to create copy for humans, and creativity is just another step on that road with rules and options to learn. // __ DON'T __ Don’t chuck in the towel just yet. Dr Fill, solved the crossword in under two minutes (two minutes faster than human contestants) but did get stuck on two words and finished with errors but won on points despite the penalties. The puzzles chosen could have aided the machine too because there were no problematic elements like putting words in spelt backwards
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