More than 1,000 humans fail to beat AI contender in top crossword battle

In brief An AI system has bested nearly 1,300 human competitors in the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament to achieve the top score. The computer, named Dr Fill, is the brainchild of computer scientist Matt Ginsberg, who designed its software to automatically fill out crosswords using a mixture of "good old-fashioned AI" and more modern machine-learning techniques, according to Slate. It was able to solve multiple word conundrums fast with fewer errors than its opponents. Dr Fill, however, was not eligible for the $3,000 cash prize, which instead went to the best human player, a man named Tyler Hinman, who presumably isn't feeling somewhat redundant. Ginsberg's machine contained a computer running a 64-core CPU and two GPUs, and was trained on tons of text scraped from Wikipedia to learn words, and a database of crossword clues and their answers to parse the competition questions.