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4 years ago
How a File Format Led to a Crossword Scandal.
In 2016 I designed a plain-text file format for crossword puzzle data, and then spent a couple of months building a micro-data-pipeline, scraping tens of thousands of crosswords from various sources. Then, having all those crosswords in a simple format, I wanted to see if there were any common grid patterns--and discovered egregious plagiarism by a major crossword editor that had gone on for years.