"Jean-Charles Meyrignac" <jean-charles.meyrignac@vnumail.com> joined
the wordgame-programmers@onelist.com mailing list and introduced us
to a newspaper word-puzzle which is popular in France - briefly,
it is equivalent to crossword filling - but the level of difficulty
is rather higher because letters are scored (like Scrabble) and the
crossword grids are *very* dense, almost to the level of word-squares.
(In fact they are word-squares, with just a couple of blank squares)

Finding the highest possible scoring square for any one grid *may*
be an intractable problem (or at least as you keep increasing
the size of the grid you can be sure it will eventually be so),
so an interesting challenge will be to write a program which finds
as high a score as possible within a given time constraint.  This may
be Jean-Charles' next project and if he writes any code in this area
we will add it here.

Jean-Charles' email on the subject is in mail.txt, reproduced with
his permission.  His existing code for this problem is in directory
maxiscore.  Also here are some modifications he made to my wordsquare
program to speed it up (primarily replacing strings with bit-vectors)

Graham Toal