What a Crossword AI Reveals About Humans' Way With Words

At last week's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, held as a virtual event with more than 1,000 participants, one impressive competitor made news. For the first time, artificial intelligence managed to outscore the human solvers in the race to fill the grids with speed and accuracy. It was a triumph for Dr. Fill, a crossword-solving automaton that has been vying against carbon-based cruciverbalists for nearly a decade. For some observers, this may have seemed like just another area of human endeavor where AI now has the upper hand. Reporting on Dr. Fill's achievement for Slate, Oliver Roeder wrote, "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."