Hacker Cinema
Wordplay
2006 · Film · documentary · 94 min
Directed by Patrick Creadon
From the masters who create the mind-bending diversions to the tense competition at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, Patrick Creadon's documentary reveals a fascinating look at a decidedly addictive pastime. Creadon captures New York Times editor Will Shortz at work, talks to celebrity solvers -- including Bill Clinton and Ken Burns -- and presents an intimate look at the national tournament and its competitors.
4 positive1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
There was a Scrabble documentary called Word Wars (2004) and a crossword documentary called Wordplay (2006) that came out relatively close in time. Both are excellent films but reveal just how different fans of these two popular word games are. The top level crossworders had a general fund of knowledge and were mostly “normal” people. The hardcore Scrabblers were monomaniacs and dispositinally eccentric in many cases.
If anyone finds this interesting, I would also like to recommend watching Jon Stewart’s Wordplay. It is much more interesting than it sounds.
Two documentaries about word games came out at similar times. “Word Wars” (2004) was about Scrabble and “Wordplay” (2006) was about crosswords. Both are excellent films about high-level play in these games.
After watching them, what struck me was that the best Scrabble players were all, shall I say, a bit weirder than the best crossword players.
Crossword requires a large general fund of knowledge. Scrabble only requires rote memorization. Crossword attracted well-rounded people. Top Scrabblers were monomaniacs.
This reminds me of the documentary "Wordplay" about competitive crossword puzzle players. Without a formal proof, my guess is that scrabble is faster to solve that a hard crossword puzzle for a computer. It's amazing that the human mind can stitch together patterns like these and internalize that in a meaningful way. A cool extension of this project would be to write a scrabble tool that generates arbitrary strategies that would be useful for a human player. So instead of generating the best play for a move, the program would recognize that "when the board is like X, then try and use strategy Y"
Awesome project @zephod!
That's covered a bit in the Wordplay movie, they had both Clinton and Dole comment about it (both saying they knew they won because it said so in the NYT crossword).
If you haven't seen the movie Wordplay, do yourself a favor and watch it. Will Shortz is a central figure in it and seems like a true word hacker.
Also a shameless plug, I run a crossword puzzle database that maps the relationships between answers and clues (I wanted to see what clues pointed to what answers and vice versa). It may be of interest here:
http://crosswordtracker.com/
This puzzle is mentioned in the lovely documentary Wordplay[1], which ostensibly follows a cadre of competitors in a year of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Well worth a watch, and I believe it's on Netflix.
[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/