![]() The goal is to fill in the squares with words, so that the words intersect at certain squares in such a way that the clues are solved. ![]() What is a Crossword Puzzle?Ī crossword puzzle is a word game in which players are given a grid of blank squares and a set of clues. Some solvers even offer additional features such as word definitions, anagram solvers, and more. There are many online crossword solvers available, and they can be used for free or with a subscription. They can also be useful for improving your vocabulary and learning new words. ![]() Crossword solvers can be a valuable resource for completing difficult or unknown words in a crossword puzzle. It works by allowing you to input a word pattern or partial word, and it returns a list of possible matches based on the letters you have entered. In our case,we have two constraints: the total sum of our letters must match the letter counts from the quote, and the first letter counts must match the letter counts from the source.A crossword solver is a tool that helps you solve crossword puzzles. How does this work in our case? Let’s set the variables to be the words in our word list, and the constraints are (1) the number of letters in the word, and (2) the starting letter of the word. Then within those that meet that constraint, you want to maximize some value. Instead, you can think of an ILP problem like this: you have a large set of variables from which you want to choose only those that meet some constraint. Now about ILP: my math brain likes to think of these problems as “maximize c Tx subject to Ax=b” but I realize that’s not everyone’s cup of tea. Now, integer programming is NP-complete, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t good heuristics for solving them, so I figured if I could simply cast this problem as an ILP one, I could leverage an existing solver just like the star battle solution did. Nearing the end of my rope, I ran across this Redditor’s solution to the star battle problem in which they cast the problem as an integer linear programming (ILP) one and simply applied an existing ILP solver. I tried several ways to get an efficient acrostic generator but nothing worked. Most of you can stop reading here but if you want to know the technical nitty-gritty about how this got done, read on … Too many people to thank here, but let’s start with Parker supplying a first take on a solution to this problem, Jeremy for being a sounding board for ideas, and Joon for collaborating on getting acrostics into the JPZ format in the first place. We’ll be making more puzzles like this soon, and we hope you do too. In addition to the solution, it will also give you inputs to Jeff’s JPZ generator, so you can just copy/paste the data into that site. It’s very user-friendly and will generally spit out a solution to your acrostic in well under a minute. Head on over to this link to leverage the Python script for yourself. But thanks to the magic of python anywhere, now anyone with a web browser can generate acrostic puzzles in this way. I’ve tried writing this script in JavaScript but it was too slow for general use. I don’t generally like releasing tools in Python, though, as it presents a barrier to entry for some people. You can use your own word list for this process and set the minimum score threshold within. Don’t like one of the words in the result? Tell the generator that and it will make another one for you with that word excluded. Well, we’ve got good news there too! Say hello to the Acrostic Generator, a Python script that will take your quote, author, and work, and spit out an acrostic for you, usually in under a minute. There’s no easily available tool to help with the creation of these things, and though it’s not too hard by hand, that may be a barrier to entry for new constructors. Potentially a bigger challenge, though, comes with the creation of an acrostic puzzle. Just plug in your values and you’ve got a JPZ ready to make available on your site, or even embedded on your site. Jeff Davidson’s kotwords site has an acrostic puzzle JPZ creation tool, which is very user-friendly. So what’s holding constructors back?Ĭonstructors may not know how to create a JPZ of an acrostic puzzle, but there’s good news there. This is a shame, because acrostic puzzles are very fun, and I for one want to see more of them. The Crossword Nexus Solver has supported acrostic puzzles for a while now, but acrostic puzzles remain relatively uncommon in the indie puzzle community.
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