This time there’s a daily puzzle from 2003. I must admit I really, really wanted to tinker with some of these clues, though in the end I only tweaked one clue for historical reasons – it should be easy enough to see which.
I also clicked on the Copilot prompts for about half-a-dozen clues, just to see what might appear. One or two of the suggested alternative versions would just about have worked (1/2 down probably generated the best new version), while anything with an anagram was rewritten out of existence. And Copilot flatly refused to rewrite one clue on the grounds of not being able to find a polite replacement. See if you can work out which.
With the benefit of more time I may experiment more with Copilot and its understanding of crossword clues (if there’s anything there to experiment with). The other computer-guided intruder drawing askance looks is the AIOSEO score (All-In-One Search Engine Optimization, apparently) which delivers high scores on the solution pages (which are full of part-words and other gibberish), and lower scores on these posts. I’ve just dropped below 70 here, but the solution to the 2003 puzzle scores 93. You do have to wonder what is being searched for.
Years ago I attended a course on writing for web pages, and the presenter made much of how people read them. Eye-tracking equipment had mapped how people scanned pages, and look! – up on the screen was a shaded pattern that looked exactly like Google results. And that was therefore how pages should be laid out. I should, I really should, have asked him what the pattern looked like with search engine results omitted. It’s fairly plausible that a large number of page views are of search results, and probably enough to skew the outcome.
It might also explain the AIOSEO score – if you’re trying to match to a search engine then the solution page looks much more like an array of Google results, the clues look like a slightly long-winded version of Google results (and thus score less), and a page like this – pah!
But I’ve edged back to a score of 70 so those last two paragraphs must be what everyone is looking for. If, on the other hand, you’re looking for Phi puzzles for the first half of February, the score is about to hit 100. Friday 7 and Friday 14 February are the regular days in the Independent (you might find that one of them has an obvious theme). There should be an Enigmatic Variations puzzle from Kcit on Sunday 9th in the Telegraph, while the anonymous side of the Times puzzles has me appearing with a daily, also on 14 February, and a cryptic Jumbo the day after.
And now I really must get the final APEX reminder off, which I had promised to have done by Thursday.
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