Who is Dr. Fill?
😉
The Economist in A match for angry words, reports on the construction of a cross-word playing computer, Dr. Fill, that must meet this constraint:
Dr Ginsberg gave himself an additional constraint in building his solver: that it fit on a laptop. That requires his software to be cleverer than Watson, which had many terabytes of data to sift through, but also makes it portable for shows. Dr Ginsberg says this is possible because crossword puzzle clues have correct answers that can be tested against the grid.
The story is amusing and the jury is still the success of Dr. Fill.
The important lesson is that Dr. Fill was designed to take advantage of the constraints imposed by the problem. Dr. Fill makes no attempt to be a fully general solution and therein lies the cleverness of its design. It solves the problem posed, not all other possible problems or variants.
How many unasked problems does your latest solution solve?
[…] my post earlier today about the new hardware/software release by Cray, A Computer More Powerful Than Watson. The release refers to RDF as a “graph […]
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