Crosswords on Insignificant Bits

On board the rebus

Wed, 22 Nov 2017 19:30:23 +0000

My most recent post, for those too lazy to follow the link and hit the “Reveal All” button, is a crossword puzzle announcing the birth of our third son, Samuel Yit-Mun Copeland. We’re over the moon with this new guy in our family. Here he is nearly asleep in my arms as I type this.

But now for something more boring.

I decided months ago that my typical geeky announcement would take the form of a crossword since I’ve been playing in that area recently (previous announcements: a manpage for Alex, an ascii-art crypto program for Ian). And why not make this puzzle interesting by constructing my first rebus puzzle?

ACPT

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 12:29:00 +0000

The American Crossword Puzzle Tournament starts tomorrow. I’ve paid the entrance fee for the online “bragging rights only” track, so I’m looking forward to seeing some interesting puzzles and to get an idea of how my solving skills stack up. Considering that competitive solvers often finish well under five minutes on a Monday and my best is in the ten minute range, probably not that great, but we shall see.

On placing letters

Wed, 16 Nov 2016 13:52:10 +0000

Work continues on my fork of the QXW crossword filler, which by now is about 50% rewritten by me and ultimately will end up looking nothing like its predecessor. Already it is a command-line, monte carlo automatic filler instead of a user-directed GTK program. Both have their uses, I think.

In a previous post, I wished that QXW supported scored dictionaries. It turns out that it does, though in my tests it gave unexpected results in many cases. I’ve reworked most of that code and am pretty happy with the results I get now. Just to cherry-pick a before-and-after example:

More boring crossword stuff

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 17:21:26 +0000

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.