General Information
During the IJCAI-07 conference (Hyderabad, January 6-12, 2007) WebCrow, a Web-based automatic crossword solving system, will challenge humans in a "Crossword Competition", on American-style crosswords. The Competition will start on the first day of the conference and will remain open, online, until January 10 (24:00, local time). The registration is free and nice prizes will be awarded to winners (see below).
The competition will take place online. To allow a worldwide participation, unaffected by the different time zones, we decided to keep the competition open for five consecutive days.
The competition will be based on four different unpublished crosswords with different degrees of complexity. For each puzzle a specific time limit will be given.
The award ceremony will take place on January 11th at 15:00, at the WebCrow exhibition booth. The publication of the official results will be followed by a public demonstration of the WebCrow system.
The participants that placed from 1st to 10th will be awarded (this prize list may be increased):
- Overall Winner: iPod video + WebCrow t-shirt
- Second best: USB pen drive + WebCrow t-shirt
- Third best: USB pen drive + WebCrow t-shirt
- From 4th to 10th: WebCrow t-shirt
Please read the competition rules for further details. For
any question about the
competition please contact webcrow
dii.unisi.it
Registering for the Competition
- To register for the competition please fill the online registration form. In order to successfully complete the registration you will have to insert the correct postal address where you want the prizes to be sent in case of victory.
- You will receive an email containing an http link to a confirmation-page. Upon visiting the page, your competition account will be created using a password and username supplied by you.
- You will then receive a final confirmation email.
- You can register at any time before the end of the competition (Jan. 10th).
Competition Rules
- The participants will be asked to solve four different unpublished crosswords of different complexity. A specific time limit (e.g. 15 minutes) will be imposed for each crossword. The overall competition will last around an our.
- The puzzles will be chosen blindly (from a set of 10 puzzles for each crossword category) immediately before the IJCAI conference.
- The participants should verify in advance that they have registered for the contest and that they can run the Contest applet. We take no responsibility for technical problems encountered by on line participants during the contest.
- Each player will be able to fill the puzzles only once.
- In addition to the four crosswords, we will provide a five minute demo puzzle that will not affect the overall ranking and that can be used to familiarize with the competition platform software.
- For experimental reason the behavior of each participant will be stored and may be subsequently analized.
- The grid filling of the winners will be published on WebCrow's website.
- Scoring:
- For each puzzle, the participants will obtain a number of points ranging between 0 and 100, based on the percentage of correct grid-filling (correct words inserted / total words to be inserted).
- 10 "quality bonus" points will be given in case of a perfect solution.
- Up to 15 "time bonus" points will be given for fast completion of puzzles (one point per minute remaining). To control against someone simply clicking "Done" on an empty puzzle and receiving 15 points, these "time bonus" will be given only for puzzles having a minimum of 50% words correct.
- Ranking:
- The score of the participants in the overall ranking will be given by the sum of all the points obtained on all 4 puzzles.