A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
We are presented with a crossword, but instead of clues, we have a prompt to enter text. Inputting a word into the textbox gives a score from -100 to 100 for each clue. We may be familiar with the game Semantle, in which you are trying to guess the target word by entering words that are semantically similar. Semantle uses Word2Vec to compute a semantic similarity score -100 to 100 between the target and input word.
However, we should notice two things: 1. It’s hard to obtain a score greater than 50 or 60 no matter which word is input, and 2. The textbox accepts arbitrary strings, including numbers and spaces, as input. Eventually, we will realize that the system is not calculating similarity to words, but crossword clues. The only way to obtain a perfect similarity score of 100.00 is to match the hidden target clue exactly. However, getting close enough to the clue should be enough to answer. For example, “Goodbye Reptile” gives a score of 83.03 on 1 Across, so we don’t need to know that the hidden clue is “Reptile in a common farewell message” from “See you later, Alligator!” to know that the answer is ALLIGATOR.
1 A | L | L | I | 2 G | A | 3 T | O | 4 R | 5 A | D | 6 D | E | 7 R | 8 O | P | I | N | 9 E | ||
G | R | E | E | T | I | N | G | S | ||||||||||||
10 I | N | D | I | A | N | A | 11 C | H | E | E | S | E | B | U | R | G | E | R | S | |
L | N | E | S | E | E | |||||||||||||||
12 I | M | P | E | D | I | 13 M | E | N | T | 14 S | O | 15 B | A | S | S | 16 O | O | N | ||
T | E | O | T | 17 H | O | N | O | R | M | C | ||||||||||
Y | 18 S | Q | U | A | R | E | R | A | 19 O | B | 20 S | C | E | N | E | |||||
W | R | M | 21 M | E | N | T | H | G | ||||||||||||
22 S | C | A | M | 23 O | V | E | R | W | A | T | C | H | 24 A | M | A | S | 25 S | |||
O | R | 26 O | N | A | D | G | A | |||||||||||||
27 L | U | M | I | N | O | S | I | T | Y | 28 S | 29 U | P | 30 E | R | G | I | 31 A | N | T | |
V | W | 32 E | N | P | Y | W | Y | |||||||||||||
33 E | P | 34 O | N | A | 35 D | I | 36 A | B | L | O | I | I | I | 37 H | A | I | R | |||
P | R | O | F | E | S | S | 38 O | R | ||||||||||||
39 C | I | T | A | D | E | L | T | K | 40 P | O | O | P | E | D | 41 E | |||||
O | I | 42 T | R | E | V | I | 43 U | D | U | N | ||||||||||
44 M | I | C | K | 45 E | Y | S | R | 46 D | A | N | C | E | F | L | O | O | R | S | ||
F | A | L | K | E | N | |||||||||||||||
47 O | R | A | N | G | E | 48 C | H | I | C | 49 K | E | N | 50 S | A | N | T | A | N | A | |
R | L | O | F | E | O | U | C | R | ||||||||||||
51 T | H | R | E | E | 52 B | E | E | F | Y | 53 T | E | M | P | E | R | A | T | E |
Once the grid is filled, solvers can read the highlighted rows of the crossword to get the cluephrase GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN, which precedes the answer with word enumeration 3 5 3 in a famous scene in the movie Wargames:
A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY.
This puzzle being solvable at all was honestly a huge surprise to me (Edgar). My idea was to create “Sentence Semantle” since we all had a blast playing original Semantle early on in the year. Even with a detailed description of the answer, it took around 20-30 minutes to solve a single clue in my initial test. Based on this information, we constructed an initial “final” version that was around 25 clues long. Once the testsolvers figured out how the system worked, they started accelerating faster and faster, and blasted through that version in around an hour. So we scaled the puzzle up, and Alejandro was daring enough to change a lot of the clues to be more creative, less direct clues that you would actually see in a crossword, which increased the coolness of solving those clues by a lot. Somehow, our testsolvers were able to adapt to that too, and showed us how much better you can get at playing a game over the course of a few hours, from struggling to get that first clue with much uncertainty to powering through by the end.