The contest’s organizer, New York Times Puzzle Editor Will Shortz, pointed out that Dr.Fill’s biggest advantage is speed: it can fill in answers in an instant that humans have to type out. And to be sure, Dr.Fill still isn’t necessarily the best, and that’s not only because the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament’s official championship is reserved only for humans. Given that unstructured nature, it’s amazing that a computer can compete at all. “I thought it would be a good test to see how the technology we’ve created in this field would handle that kind of creative language use.”

“Crossword fills require you to make these creative multi-hop lateral connections with language,” says Professor Dan Klein, who leads the Natural Language Processing team. A way with words: A pair of NVIDIA RTX 2080 Tis powered a sophisticated neural network developed by UC Berkeley’s Natural Language Processing team. “Games are an amazing environment,” he says.ĭr.Fill’s edge? A sophisticated neural network developed by UC Berkeley’s Natural Language Processing team - trained in just days on an NVIDIA DGX-1 system and deployed on a PC equipped with a pair of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs - that snapped right into the system Ginsberg had been refining for years. Such games, played competitively, test the limits of how computers think and help researchers better understand how people do, Ginsberg explains. Who knew, though, that these parallel processing powerhouses could have a way with words, too.įollowing a long string of victories for computers in other games - chess in 1997, go in 2016 and Texas hold’em poker in 2019 - a GPU-powered AI has beaten some of the world’s most competitive word nerds at the crossword puzzles that are a staple of every Sunday paper.ĭr.Fill, the crossword puzzle-playing AI created by Matt Ginsberg - a serial entrepreneur, pioneering AI researcher and former research professor - scored higher than any humans last month at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament.ĭr.Fill’s performance against more than 1,300 crossword enthusiasts comes after a decade of playing alongside humans through the annual tournament.

What’s a three-letter acronym for a “video-handling chip”? A GPU, of course.

Putting puzzle together on computer