AI-generated clues are often bizarre and sometimes flat-out wrong – but, setters agree, that may not be a bad thing. Plus: a podcast returns
This week, some Things of Interest to Puzzlers That You Might Otherwise Miss.
Did your school mention crossword compiling in career discussions?
It was never mentioned as a career option. I am a construction manager in the oil and gas pipeline industry.
It is still a rare event for us to welcome a new compiler to the series. While records of the early days of our flagship crossword are sketchy, it’s unlikely that there have been more than 35 compilers in all that time.
There’s a constructor who gave us the word ‘dispense’ as an across, and coming down is ‘nur’, which is an Islamic term. None of us on the editorial staff was familiar with the term ‘nur’. You could change the ‘N’ to an ‘R’ and make it ‘disperse’ and ‘R.U.R.,’ as in the Čapek play, so that is my preference for the grid.
I think it’s better as an ‘R.’ We’ll reach more solvers with that. But then there was the issue: did the constructor purposely choose ‘nur’ and think that was a significant thing for people to know? And people would get it from the crossings. The clue for ‘dispense’ would be really clear, and the other two across answers were readily gettable. In the old days, I definitely would’ve changed that to an ‘R.’ Nowadays, we’re talking about it.
1 Chap recalled skill: something frequently repeated (6)
Mantra – The word ‘chap’ is a shortened form of ‘chapman,’ which is an archaic term for a trader or merchant. ‘Recalled’ is a hint at the reversal of the word ‘trader’ to get ‘redarat’ [sic], which is a homophone for ‘mantra’. ‘Something frequently repeated’ is a description of the definition of a mantra.
So I lend a hand, inviting the bot to scramble marmalade. It shoots back ‘a lad, marry’, which any Charlie can see is off-beam. Still, I encourage my apprentice – as that’s how the power dynamic has shifted. I ask its e-brain to combine anagram and definition, resulting in, ‘A lad may marry this sweet spread (7) [sic]’.
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