Show HN: Experiments in AI-generation of crosswords

38 points

a year ago

Hi HN, I've been experimenting on-and-off over the years trying to automatically generate crosswords [1]. Recently I've been feeling like my results are good enough that I want to share them and see what other people think. I'm not trying to claim that these could appear in, say, the NYT in their current state, but honestly the velocity of progress makes me feel like I will inevitably be able to automatically generate NYT-quality crosswords within just a year or so.

A write-up is here: https://abstractnonsense.com/crosswords.html

And you can play the crosswords here: https://crosswordracing.com (They should work well on both desktop and mobile, and there's a leader-board for each crossword if you want to leave your name when you solve one).

[1]: Just in case anyone is interested, my very first attempt at this problem was way back in 2006! I used multiple wordlists (e.g. list of British monarchs, with reign dates), and wrote little functions to generate clues from each list (e.g. "British monarch who ruled from {date1} to {date2}"). Even with randomized synonym substitution and similar tricks, this approach was too labor-intensive, and the results too robotic, for it to work well. Can't complain though, that project led to me getting hired as the first engineer at Justin.TV!

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