Rise of the crossword robots Computers vs. humans

Our brainy pastimes are falling, one by one, to silicon-based competitors. First there was chess, with Deep Blue beating world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. Since then, programs have bested humans at poker, and Ginsberg himself has designed software that can beat the world’s experts in bridge.

Last year, in a highly publicized match, the IBM supercomputer Watson emerged victorious in “Jeopardy!” against all-time champs Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. But crossword puzzles have always seemed like an impossible hurdle for artificial intelligence, or A.I.; their emphasis on tricky wordplay would seem to make them immune to those without human powers of wit and association.



http://bostonglobe.com/ideas/2012/03/11 ... .html?camp

I would contend that it's not Deep Blue that won the chess match. The computer was just a tool used by programmers. The actual winners of that match were those that designed and implemented the software that was able to calculate potential outcomes well enough to minimize the risk of each move. Heck, in high school I wrote a completely unbeateable checkers game on a TRS-80. It's not that hard given tree data structures with potential win/loose scoring calculated for every potential move on the board.

Watson was just a rapid access database with dynamic key searches.

Dr. Fill (Ginsburg's crossword puzzle solving software) is just an implementation of algorithms that Ginsburg himself uses to solve crosswords.

AI is a nice buzzword. Still at the core of computing it's only read, calculate and write. It's ones and zeros. It's repetitions of human logic implemented by a machine faster and more accurately than a human can do it in their head. Just like a car can cover miles faster than our feet.

Computers have not gotten 'smarter'. They have just been made faster to better handle more complex implemetations of logic designed and written by a human.

NTM, great points.

Looks like I won't have to worry about Skynet for another decade.