Crossword Puzzle Generator Given a pattern and a word list, this program will try to generate a crossword puzzle. It uses brute-force search tempered with a little cleverness. It does not generate clues. To compile, type make. To run it, you need a word list. /usr/dict/words will almost certainly not work because it does not have enough words. Get a word list with inflected forms (past tenses, plurals, &c), for instance: ftp://ftp.cs.cornell.edu/pub/turney/OSPD.shar.Z With your word list in the file word-file, type ./cword pattern1 word-file On an 80-mips workstation, using the OSPD word list, cword can generate a crossword puzzle from pattern1 in under 20 seconds. You can make your own patterns. cword won't be able to generate puzzles much larger than the standard 15x15, and will have a hard time if there are unusually large number of up/down intersections. For instance, it can generate 5x5 solid blocks of words, but it takes a long time to make a 6x6 block. cword will try to finish generating a puzzle that already has a few words filled in. Just put the letters into the pattern. It will have trouble if you specify more than a couple of words. There are a lot of other word lists that might work well; look at http://www.cis.ohio-state.edu/hypertext/faq/usenet/crossword-faq/top.html You can fetch this software from ftp://ftp.eecs.harvard.edu/users/rtm/cword.tar.gz Greg Kuperberg and David Hendler helped me with this software. Robert Morris rtm@eecs.harvard.edu ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LATER NOTE: possibly more recent sources are in http://www.pdos.lcs.mit.edu/~rtm/cword-src/ See also "how.txt" in that directory.