Since last post, I made two more puzzles, both standard newspaper size, and I appropriated and modified someone else’s javascript so that you can fill it in on that page. Both puzzles went through two drafts where I completely redid the fill after Angeline test-solved them and found some problems.
I’m still using Qxw, now with a 130k+ entry dictionary I built from 10 years of NYT puzzles, which works OK. Still, I feel like it could help even more: for example, it could rank words by their commonality in the corpus so that you don’t use something hyper-obscure that happened to be in one Saturday puzzle when the editor was asleep; or, it could give partial fills even though it may not be able to complete the whole thing; or, it could give hints on places to place black squares to improve chances that a reasonable fill exists.
To get at the latter, I extracted the qxw filler into a command-line program that just fills templates passed to it on stdin, and, into that, piped a python script that generates random valid grids. This helped for the most recent puzzle where a few spots had only two or three words that would fit given the themers, and moving a couple of blocks around was the difference between no-fills and some-fills. A quick improvement there would be to score the resulting grids, and use a genetic algorithm to produce new templates based on their fitness.