A Web-Based Agent Challenges Human Experts on Crosswords

with “the smallest initial structures” (Minsky 1968), thus making their study important for both theoretical and practical issues. Since the birth of artificial intelligence (AI), games and puzzles have received much attention. The game that has captured most of the attention of computer scientists is chess. The founding fathers of AI such as McCarthy, Simon (Simon and Schaeffer 1992), Samuel, Shannon (Shannon 1950), Turing, and Von Neumann have all been involved in automatic chess playing. After decades of unsuccessful attempts (Mittman and Newborn 1980, Munakata 1996), the IBM machine Deep Blue achieved the astonishing result of defeating world champion Gary Kasparov in May 1997 (Campbell, Hoane, and Hsu 2002). Games play the role of a laboratory where machines can safely be tested by a direct competition with humans. Along with the development of successful game-playing programs, the investigation should also include a methodological discussion on how this performance is achieved. Deep Blue heavily relied on computational power joined with a search algorithm based on static evaluation functions to assess the different configurations of the game. Instead of relying on a preprogrammed approach, Tesauro conceived TDArticles