Redundancy exploitation in the computer solution of double-crostics
Edwin S. Spiegelthal · 1960
Double-Crostics, as I suspect many of you know, constitute a species of habit-forming puzzles. There are two varieties of these brainteasers --- those that appear weekly in the Saturday Review and every two weeks in the Magazine Section of the New York Sunday Times, and a somewhat watered-down version which I have been pitting against an I.B.M. 704 computer. I shall describe both the wild and the domesticated variants in just a moment. First, though, I should like to exercise the air of frivolity which might seem to inhere in my topic. There is, of course, a long and respectable history of fruitful alliances between idle pastimes, on the one hand, and mathematical achievements, on the other. To mention just a few, there are Euler and the Konigsberg bridges, Pascal and his gambler friends, Von Neumann and his poker and, today, Dr. Samuel and his checkers. Still, such is the force of the suspicion that whatever is fun just can't be work, each tentative of this nature must be justified anew on its own merits.