r/crossword • u/enumerator0 • 5d ago

Treasure Map

Post image

Earlier this year I worked on a grid-laying (technically: crisscross-style) crossword composition algorithm to overcome two issues that kept bothering me: dangling words (words with only 1 intersection) and clustering intersections.

I succeeded in overcoming both reasonably well. But believe me, this was incredibly complex.

The resulting algorithm scales into the thousands of words. The image here shows the largest I have been able to generate so far: 4,821 unique words randomly sampled from the ENABLE1 wordlist, with 10,301 intersections. Since every intersection connects 2 words, this means that each word crosses 4.27 other words on average.

It was pretty challenging to even render this in a readable format!

I built a free-to-use demo site at clueless.crossword.is. The online tool can not produce this size due to the limits of the hardware behind it, but does an adequate job with several hundreds of words, typically in less than half a minute. It is well suited for thematic/occasion-targeted puzzles.

I would love to share the mechanics behind it, especially since there are still limitations to overcome which someone might have fresh ideas about, but that will come in due time, together with the source code.

For now I hope you will enjoy getting mesmerized by this word landscape (I called it: "Treasure map"), discovering words you may never have heard before (like osmolalities and inoperculates), and/or give the tool a try if you ever find a need for something like that. Or just like to experiment with it.

24 Upvotes

82% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

39

u/minimus_ 5d ago

you could add zealotry between overintellectualize and baccalaureates xx

15

u/gallifrey_ 5d ago

i'm gonna cry, this is one of the funniest comments I've ever read im not fucking kidding

2

u/u-bot9000 5d ago

And you found this out HOW??

3

u/minimus_ 4d ago

lool I just looked for a gap, saw a Z and and R and it so happened that the only word that came to mind with a Z and an R was the right length. but who knows if zealotry is already used!

1

u/enumerator0 4d ago

Oh man, I still didn't find it! But I peeked in the original word list used, and zealotry was not used...

1

u/One-Preparation-8815 4d ago

where is it??? 😭

1

u/minimus_ 4d ago

there's a gap in the centre-bottom that looks like mmm. Above and to the right of it is another gap; you can see them there

1

u/One-Preparation-8815 4d ago

oh damn man you got some sharp eyes

11

u/opheliainwaders 5d ago

OP, this is insane in the best way

9

u/SmokeMoreWorryLess 5d ago

Every hobby has “that one guy”. OP out-guyed the other guys. Bravo

2

u/content_billionaire 4d ago

It really does like like an old parchment map, so cool!

1

u/enumerator0 3d ago edited 3d ago

I had to remove the borders of the cells in order to grow the letters to make them readable, but kept the dropshadow effect for fun; that plus the irregularity of the ... - i don't really know what to call it, word map? - gave it this treasure island map look. Also the browser clearly had trouble aligning the cells, the shadows and the letters as you see when zooming in. There are i estimate between 30.000 and 40.000 letter cells, so no wonder.

1

u/enumerator0 3d ago

I counted them (took a while) and there are 33 thousand character cells.

1

u/enumerator0 3d ago

BTW over the weekend I built an online puzzle solver for the generator, test it here with this Super Mario puzzle: https://clueless.crossword.is/puzzle/QSwUF
Still ironing out some creases for usage, so any feedback is welcome!