Could this be a Deep Blue moment for the cryptic crossword?

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When the IBM supercomputer Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, it was an early victory for artificial intelligence over the human mind, and the culmination of decades of attempts. Almost 30 years later, a computer program has finally outdone humans at solving cryptic crosswords.

Earlier this month, a model called Darmok solved the final puzzle of the Times’s annual cryptic crossword competition about three minutes faster than Liam Hughes, 29, who became the contest’s youngest (human) winner.

After Deep Blue’s victory, the New York Times’s puzzle editor, Will Shortz, set engineers a challenge. “Is the computer going to be able to solve the clues involving puns and wordplay? I don’t think so,” he wrote. “In a much more wide-ranging and, frankly, complex game like crosswords, we humans still rate just fine.”

Less than a decade later, a computer named WebCrow beat 75 human crossworders at an AI conference, and by 2021 a program named Dr Fill “won” the American crossword puzzle tournament, the most prestigious of its type for American-style crosswords, which rely on a combination of general knowledge, allusion and double meanings.