In 2012, a computer program named Dr. Fill placed 141st out of some 660 entries in that year’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, a competition for elite crossword puzzle solvers. This year, the ...

“Knowing the specific architecture of a puzzle (the rules of symmetry, word counts, etc.), in the long run, gives you a huge advantage.” Yet, there’s one crossword gimmick that practically requires ...

“Percolation is ubiquitous in all fields of sciences like physics, mathematics, computer science, social sciences, or biology,” he adds. Percolation, in this sense, relates to what is known as ...

Such a puzzle is known as a CAPTCHA. The word was coined by computer scientist Manuel Blum of Carnegie Mellon University. It stands for “Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and ...

A small-time newspaperman named Arthur Wynne invented the first ever "word-cross" puzzle, which was published December 21, 1913 in the New York World.. Wynne's editors didn't like the puzzles that ...

One hundred years ago yesterday, a curious new feature appeared in the Sunday New York World: On Dec. 21, 1913, English-born journalist Arthur Wynne published what he called a “word-cross” puzzle.

The puzzle was a four-by-four grid with no shaded squares, but with "horizontal" and "vertical" clues. Readers were invited to fill in the blank spaces. On Dec. 21, 1913, Arthur Wynne, a journalist ...

Crosswords caught on in the first half of the 20th century, but the New York Times, whose puzzle is now famous, didn't publish a crossword until 1942. Illustration by Adam Simpson. On a blustery ...