New York Times, Friday, July 15, 2016

Will definitely saved me on this one. I sent him two very different versions — one with the minitheme that you see here, and one with a ton of examplars like this, but with unionized still far and away the best. He wisely decided to stick with what you see, and I hope everyone liked it!

As I often do, a video of Dr.Fill solving today's puzzle. It has no trouble with it, which isn't a total surprise because all of the words in the puzzle are obviously in my database.

Speaking of which, I've been working on both Dr.Fill and the my word list recently, trying to use some additional techniques from machine learning to improve performance on both sides. The word list is definitely better, which should help Dr.Fill as well, since one of its criteria when it's a bit confused is just trying to guess how good any specific fill is from a crossword perspective. The machine learning stuff on clue analysis is a bit more complicated, and I can't tell yet if it's going to be effective or not. I've got lots of time to get ready to challenge the humans next spring at Stamford, though!

Cool finding, UNIONIZED either pronounced as UN-I-ON-IZED by a CHEMIST, or UN-ION-IZED by a PLUMBER. Fun mini-theme holding this themeless together.

Themelesses are usually seeded with a few strong entries, and many times these get moved around from place to place, shifted back and forth without regard to symmetrical placements, in order to get better flexibility in filling. Forcing a placement of UNIONIZED in the center of the grid, along with CHEMIST / PLUMBER in symmetrical spots, is a tough way to start.

I like a lot of the entries Matt worked in, UNCLE LEO one of my favorite minor characters of all time. DIET DRUG right on top was fun, too. I'm not totally familiar with PETE BEST, but his auspicious place as a person called the "the fifth Beatle" makes him a neat addition to that corner.

But as a solver, I like a lot of grid flow, and this grid was too sectioned off for my taste. Each of the four corners was a bit of a mini-maze, with one entrance and one exit. I ended up getting badly stuck in the NW, as GREASY didn't totally seem like [Insincerely polite] and EUGENIE / IONA didn't come quickly. No doubt, sectioning a grid off like this helps immensely in construction, but can sometimes lead to dead-ends and frustration for solvers.

And overall, there wasn't enough sizzling fill for my taste, many of the long slots filled with the type of ADDED ON, LACED UP (not far away from UP UP), RAILED AT, PREBAKE entries that felt more neutral than colorful to me. It's tough to create a snazzy themeless when you fix three entries into place with such little flexibility.

I did really enjoy the UNIONIZED syllabication differences though. It would have been really neat to find a few more of these and create a themed puzzle around them.