Those Cryptic British Crosswords

When Will Shortz was gathering material for his recently-published book, World Class Championship Crosswords (Simon & Schuster, 1982), he visited me to consult some of my historical crossword competition material. We soon got into a spirited discussion about inadvertent ambiguity in British-style crossword puzzles: I maintained that the plethora of outs (black squares) in British diagrams allowed crossword fans sometimes to write different correct answers into the same word-path, whereas Will Shortz insisted that the typical British clue would not allow such a possibility

Automated Slovene crosswords solving with the help of the internet

The goal of the thesis was to create a program, that automatically solves Slovene crosswords with the help of puzzle dictionary and web search. For the purpose of creating the program, we used a database of 367 crosswords and puzzle dictionary with 104.123 clue answers. We also created a list of web answers for all the crosswords in the database. Because of the enormous amount of the web answers searching the whole solution space would not be feasible. That is why the program solves each crossword in two separate phases. In the first phase, a crossword gets partially solved with the help of the puzzle dictionary, which creates a list of most probable solution candidates for each clue. In the second phase, a crossword is solved with puzzle dictionary and web answers combined. For the purpose of building the program, we used a set of 37 training crosswords. The final results were obtained from a set of 330 testing crosswords

Webcrow: A web-based system for crossword solving

Language games represent one of the most fascinating challenges of research in artificial intelligence. In this paper we give an overview of WebCrow, a system that tackles crosswords using the Web as a knowledge base. This appears to be a novel approach with respect to the available literature. It is also the first solver for non-English crosswords and it has been designed to be potentially multilingual. Although WebCrow has been implemented only in a preliminary version, it already displays very interesting results reaching the performance of a human beginner: crosswords that are “easy ” for expert humans are solved, within competition time limits, with 80 % of correct words and over 90 % of correct letters

Pangrammatic Crosswords

The November 2002 Colloquy presented a 3x14 crossword grid devised by Chris McManus which contains all 26 letters of the alphabet once each

Shakespearean Crosswords

It is fairly well known that, according to the generally accepted history of the puzzles, crosswords were first created in the USA in 1913 and crossed the Atlantic to Great Britain some eleven years later. In fact, a study of much of literature shows this to be false, and reveals innumerable earlier references to crosswords. The works of William Shakespeare provide a particularly rich source of such allusions

Logological Crosswords

There are two six-letter words that should be as familiar to logologists as apple pie and hamburgers. I have disguised them as i ii iii iv v vi and I II III IV V VI. From the arrangements and definitions below, see how quickly you can decipher them

The People's Puzzle: crosswords and knowledge politics. GARP13

Everyday, millions of people lose themselves in the world of crosswords. This paper considers their motives for doing so and the effect crosswords have on their lives. It stems from my idea that the bars of the crossword grid represent Adorno's prison-like Culture Industry. By tracing the cultural politics pervading the relationships between those involved in the production and consumption of crosswords, I show crosswords to provide opportunities for freedom, escape, inspiration, innovation, mediation, subversion and critique, all existing alongside the potential for alienation, colonial domination and even a possible role in contemporary forms of Empire. Rather than presenting crosswords as a challenge to Adorno's Culture Industry model, I argue that all this potential is entirely compatible with it, so long as the Culture Industry is understood as complex rather than as simply a grim, all-encompassing, impenetrable and alienating social construction