21 ACROSS
Novelty dance spawned by a 1962 hit. 11 letters. Answer
This question is from a NYT crossword puzzle that was used in yet another Man vs Machine competition, this time pitting 25 humans against a single program, WebCrow. The machine had at its disposal a big database of past completed crowsswords, a dictionary, and the entirety of Internet. WebCrow beat the pants off the humans.
A crossword-solving computer program yesterday triumphed in a competition against humans. Two versions of the program, called WebCrow, finished first and second in a competition that gave bilingual entrants 90 minutes to work on five different crosswords in Italian and English.
The competition took place in Riva del Garda, Italy, as part of the European Conference on Artificial Intelligence. WebCrow took on 25 human competitors, mostly conference attendees, while more than 50 crossword enthusiasts and AI researchers competed online |Link via Engadget|
Although this was more of a demonstration than an actual competition, the result is no small potatos. Although the program proceeds by trial and error, its not exactly brute force because you can’t guarantee a solution. Furthermore, solutions sometimes rest on puns or other word play that can confound any straightforward algorithmic approach and requires some understanding of the language involved. Of course, that understanding is freely available on Internet. But the AI researchers involved don’t want to give credit where due. Internet is just ‘shallow knowledge’, apparently.
Tony Veale works on software that can deal with human language at University College Dublin, Ireland, and watched WebCrow in action. He told New Scientist he was impressed. “It’s part of a trend to use the web as a shallow source of human knowledge for artificial intelligence,” he says.
The web is “shallow” because most content cannot be understood by a computer, Veale explains, but the links between content can be used more easily to provide some information about how things are related.
Quine would be pissed.
