The Berkeley Crossword Solver, an artificial intelligence from the University of Berkeley, beat a human for the first time in the American Crossword Solving Tournament. The algorithm solves 81.7% of puzzles without errors, does not confuse or skip letters. This result is a quarter better than that of the predecessor algorithm.

Solving crossword puzzles is a good opportunity to practice the language skills of artificial intelligence. He needs to understand the pun, access a large knowledge base and select "intersecting" options.

The Berkeley Crossword Solver was trained on 6.4 million question-answer pairs.

First, the algorithm generates all possible answers to the question, then weeds them out, taking into account the restrictions: the number of letters and the required intersections.

Prior to Berkeley Crossword Solver, the most successful algorithms were Dr. Fill and Proverb. In tournaments, they took 141 and 213 places.

The new artificial intelligence in 2021 took first place among a thousand participants. The creators of Berkeley Crossword Solver decided to talk about this in detail just now.