Dr.Fill participated in the 2012 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, finishing 141st of approximately 650 entrants with a total score of just over 10,000 points.
The appearance led to a variety of descriptions of Dr.Fill in the popular press, including The Economist,[2] the San Francisco Chronicle[3] and Gizmodo.
A video of the program solving the first six puzzles from that tournament, together with a talk given by Ginsberg describing its performance, can be found on YouTube.
The tournament was won by Tyler Hinman (12,760 points), who completed the championship puzzle perfectly in three minutes.
As described by Ginsberg, Dr.Fill works by converting a crossword to a weighted constraint satisfaction problem and then attempting to maximize the probability that the fill is correct.
Probabilities for individual words or phrases in the puzzle are computed using relatively simple statistical techniques based on features such as previous appearances of the clue, number of Google hits for the fill, and so on.