Word Freak beats BestBot

Tuesday night, Word Freak played its first match against BestBot from the Woogles team, the strongest crossword game AI on Earth at ~2,431 rating.

Word Freak won.

That’s real, but it is not a coronation. It was one game, on our first try, and the honest read is that variance probably helped us. A single win against BestBot is a signal worth celebrating; it is not proof that Word Freak is stronger than BestBot.

The current benchmark is more grounded: we still have not cracked a 55% win rate against Quackle. That is the next bar. Until Word Freak can beat Quackle consistently, the BestBot win belongs in the “promising but noisy” column.

Right now we’re wrapping up the engine rewrite and training against harder baselines. The goal is still Nigel Richards. The work in front of us is still Quackle.