crosswords

In March, The New York Times made a small but important change to its crosswords app: it dropped the “Crosswords” part of the name in favor of “Games.” It’s a small but important shift that acknowledges how the app has grown from a place to play the crossword into a hub for many of the NYT’s growing library of games.In addition to the daily crossword, the app now lets you access mini crosswords (“the Mini”), Wordle, a word-spelling game called Spelling Bee, and, as part of some recent updates, sudoku and a visual puzzle…

Crossword puzzles aren't always easy to solve even for the most avid human fans, and they also remain one of the most challenging areas in artificial intelligence. Now, the University of Siena in Italy and expert.ai have a launched an AI software called WebCrow 2.0 that can solve crossword puzzles not just in English, but also in Italian. WebCrow 2.0 uses natural language processing technology to understand a puzzle's clues like a human player would.  That's trickier than it sounds, seeing as the same word could mean…

Good Sodoku developers Zach Gage and Jack Schlesinger are back again today with the launch of a creative new game for iOS, Mac, Android, and PC. Knotwords is a minimal and elegant logic puzzle that offers a familiar yet novel experience. The rules for Knotwords are straightforward, like a standard crossword puzzle, you need to place letters in each section so all the words are valid across and down. However, instead of giving you clues to the full words that will be used in each puzzle, Knotwords places letters…