New york times crossword editor how to#

“Most crossword contributors nowadays use computer assistance like this - although the whole process is much more human-directed than you might think,” he wrote in his NYT column. Shortz, an IU alum, wrote that such programs are often used by the puzzlemakers of today. “He spent day after day over the summer trying to debug it.

New york times crossword editor how to#

“For someone who was learning how to program, it was a huge task of getting it debugged,” Michael said. For his 12th birthday, he asked for a more sophisticated word list to feed into the program to make more complicated puzzles. Then, Daniel took over, tweaking and adding to the program. But to help Daniel with his project, Michael wrote a simple computer program that helps him find words of the appropriate length with some of the right letters. According to the Times’ crossword editor, the Times gets an average of 75 submissions a week. When Daniel’s father heard he was shooting to get a crossword published in the New York Times, Michael was encouraging, but realistic. You get frustrated sometimes, but that’s just part of it,” he said on Wednesday. Solving a crossword is one thing, he said, but creating his own grids was satisfying on a completely different level. Not long after that, he decided to submit a puzzle of his own. In a further sign of crossword continuity, this year’s winner was Mr.Soon Daniel was solving the puzzles alongside his father and sister. Ginsberg himself constructs crossword puzzles as a hobby, with more than two dozen published in The New York Times.

If so, that’s good for the crossword puzzleĬommunity” - though a greater programming challenge for Dr. “But people did say the puzzles were particularly innovative this year. “I have no reason to believe that’s the case,” Dr. Shortz shook his head no, and smiled, when asked that question after the tournament ended Sunday afternoon. Shortz choose puzzles with foiling the computer program in mind? Mr. Shortz would include a puzzle or two that involved innovative twistsĭid Mr. Dan Feyer, last year’s winner, said before the tournament began that he figured Mr. Shortz commissions and edits the puzzles in the contest. Fill got killed on puzzles two and five,” said Will Shortz, director of the tournament, who is also the crossword puzzle editor of The New York Times. And another puzzle required correct answers, not just across and down, but some words arrayed diagonally as well. One included several words that had to be spelled backwards. “Two of the puzzles were bizarre in ways that were bad for it,” Dr. Indeed, the seventh puzzle, a difficult one, it got perfectly.īut the computer program is literal minded, and tends to struggle on puzzles with humor, and puzzles with unusual themes or letter arrangements. Fill typically thrives on conventional crosswords, even ones with arcane clues and answers. “It was within the range, but I wish it had done better,” Dr. Fill finished 141st, or would have (only human solvers got official rankings). Said, “If I’m unlucky, I’ll end up 150th,” but still in the top fourth. With only seven puzzles, the range of possible outcomes was wide. Ginsberg said the program would probably finish in the top 50, among the 600 contestants. In simulations of 15 past tournaments, Dr. Fill and an expert in artificial intelligence, predicted a range of likely outcomes for his clever code. Fill, which I wrote about earlier, matched its digital wits against the wetware of 600 of the nation’s best human solvers at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn.īefore the tournament, Matthew Ginsberg, the creator of Dr. Over the weekend, an impressive crossword-solving computer program, called Dr.

Score one for humans and their subtle, quirky, pattern-matching brains. Fill, that competed at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Chris Pietsch for The New York Times Matthew Ginsberg, the man behind a computer program, called Dr.