Posted on 03/04/2016 6:09:10 PM PST by SMGFan
A group of eagle-eyed puzzlers, using digital tools, has uncovered a pattern of copying in the professional crossword-puzzle world that has led to accusations of plagiarism and false identity.
Since 1999, Timothy Parker, editor of one of the nation’s most widely syndicated crosswords, has edited more than 60 individual puzzles that copy elements from New York Times puzzles, often with pseudonyms for bylines, a new database has helped reveal. The puzzles in question repeated themes, answers, grids and clues from Times puzzles published years earlier. Hundreds more of the puzzles edited by Parker are nearly verbatim copies of previous puzzles that Parker also edited. Most of those have been republished under fake author names.
(Excerpt) Read more at fivethirtyeight.com ...
Let me guess, he supports Rubio.
Oh the horror of it all!
I bet he doesn’t women exit the elevator first, too.
He was a graduate of the MLK, Jr., school of writing.
Joe Biden school of plagiarism and brain cramps
Reminds me of the renowned lady pianist who never recorded a single track of her own but her husband re-released other people’s work under her name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Hatto
If a computer can be taught to play chess and beat grand masters, why don’t they simply program computers to generate puzzles. It seems a no brainer.
When this kind of thing happens in the rarefied innermost sanctum of the cross word puzzle kingdom, you can’t hide your head any longer, and you finally know without a doubt, no matter how much you hid it from yourself, that Donald Trump is a liberal.
Clue: American author's bus station, perhaps.
Five letters. Have a go, then tell me (I am assuming you'll solve it) how to program a computer to generate such a clue.
If you toss in the towel, I'll provide the answer.
DePoe...?
Now, imagine the sheer quantity of programming required for a computer to create such a clue. There would have to be a database of American phonemes and variants (depot, depoe, etc.) There would have to be a gazetteer of famous people, and it would have to be huge. There would have to be a choice mechanism: is it pronounced dehpo or deepo, with dehpo being disqualified for the purposes of creating this clue, which mechanism, privately, I believe to be impossible to create short of including every possible pronunciation of every combination of letters.
There would have to be a means of compiling idiocies (i.e. arbitrary nonstandard usages and pronunciations for the purpose of wordplay) and some sort of selection mechanism for same. These factors, and others I haven't mentioned, imply a complexity in the programming of wordplay that is, as a guess, hundreds of orders of magnitude greater than that of chess.
Not to denigrate chess, not at all. However, fact of the matter is that chess CAN be analysed effectively completely by exhaustion of possibilities, whereas language cannot, not even close. Information is constantly entering the world of language; witness the number of neologisms created weekly, right? Not so chess.
FReegards to you!
Your putative "full" database is, by definition, the total of human imagination vis-a-vis language, and, also by definition, cannot possibly include neologisms.
A "full" database, forsooth!
BTW, when I was talking about computers doing puzzles...I was referring to the easier, daily ones, and the types you see in hundreds of puzzle books. It should be easy to program a computer to generate those..
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