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                    December 1997 Programmer's Challenge
                                      
                            Clueless Crosswords
                                      
              Mail solutions to: [33]progchallenge@mactech.com
               Due Date: 11:59pm EDT, Monday, 1 December 1997
                                      
                            Clueless Crosswords
                                      
    A couple of months ago, Bob Noll sent me a Challenge suggestion
   involving a crossword puzzle variant published by one of his local
   newspapers. The difficulty in using that suggestion was deciding how
   to provide the clues to the puzzle in a usable form. I thought about
   providing some sort of thesaurus, but giving simple synonyms as clues
   didn't seem to capture the crossword spirit. Then it occurred to me
   that clues serve only to make the crossword easy to solve, an
   advantage that certainly wouldn't be needed by our skilled Challenge
   readers or by the code they write. So the Challenge this month is to
   write code that will solve a crossword puzzle without clues.
   
   The prototype for the code you should write is:
   
     #define kMaxSize 32
     typedef char Puzzle[kMaxSize][kMaxSize];
     
     void Crossword(
     
     Puzzle thePuzzle,   /* return solved puzzle here */
     char *dictionary, /* array of words to choose from */
     long puzzleSize,    /* number of rows/cols in puzzle */
     long dictSize       /* number of words in dictionary */
     
     );
     
   Your Crossword routine will be provided with thePuzzle, where cell
   thePuzzle[row][col] will be initialized to a zero if you are to fill
   in that cell, or initialized to 0xFF if the cell is blacked out. The
   first puzzleSize rows and columns constitute the puzzle; the remaining
   cells in thePuzzle array are padding and should be ignored. You are to
   fill in the empty cells of thePuzzle with words from the dictionary
   provided, such that each uninterrupted sequence of blank cells, both
   horizontal and vertical, forms a word from the dictionary. The
   dictionary will contain all of the words needed to solve thePuzzle,
   but, to make things more interesting, it will also contain extra words
   not needed to solve thePuzzle. The dictionary may contain only a few
   extra words, or it may contain as many as 10 extra words for each word
   used in thePuzzle. Words in the dictionary are not guaranteed to be in
   any order, and any word might be used more than once in thePuzzle.
   
   Each puzzle is guaranteed to have at least one solution using the
   dictionary provided. You will be guaranteed 20MB of memory for your
   code, static data, and any dynamically allocated memory. You may use
   more memory if it is available, but your code should detect and
   respond to memory allocation failures if you ask for more than the
   guaranteed amount of memory. As always, you must deallocate any
   dynamically allocated memory before returning.
   
   This will be a native PowerPC Challenge, using the latest CodeWarrior
   environment. Solutions may be coded in C, C++, or Pascal. The
   Challenge winner will be the entry that provides a correct solution to
   a set of crossword puzzles in the minimum time. Thanks to Bob Noll for
   suggesting a crossword puzzle problem, he wins two Challenge points
   for the suggestion.

References

   1. http://www.mactech.com/misc/about_mt.html
   2. http://www.mactech.com/
   3. http://www.mactech.com/progchallenge/Action.lasso?-database=ads-mt.fp3&-layout=main&-response=/pub/ads-mt/redirect.html&-recid=39&[doscript.post]=links&-search
   4. http://www.mactech.com/misc/about_mt.html
   5. http://www.mactech.com/
   6. http://www.mactech.com/business/subscribe.html
   7. http://www.mactech.com/cdrom/
   8. https://www.depotstore.com/mactech/riskfree/offer.html?FROM=MTRF
   9. http://www.mactech.com/macdev-1/index.html
  10. http://www.mactech.com/news/mt-news.html
  11. http://www.mactech.com/advancedsearch.html
  12. http://www.mactech.com/macintosh-c/
  13. http://www.mactech.com/editorial/gettingstarted.html
  14. http://www.mactech.com/online/
  15. http://www.mactech.com/progchallenge/
  16. http://www.mactech.com/jobs/
  17. http://www.mactech.com/articles/
  18. http://www.mactech.com/editorial/filearchives.html
  19. http://www.mactech.com/editorial/writersguide.html
  20. http://www.mactech.com/editorial/abouteditors.html
  21. http://www.mactech.com/editorial/calendar.html
  22. http://www.devdepot.com/catpage.html?CREF=32
  23. http://www.mactech.com/business/adsales.html
  24. http://www.mactech.com/business/custservice.html
  25. http://www.apple.com/developer/wwdc2000
  26. http://www.devdepot.com/
  27. http://www.xplain.com/thinkreference/
  28. http://www.devcentral.com/
  29. http://www.netinnovators.com/
  30. http://www.xplain.com/aboutXPwww.html
  31. http://www.mactech.com/misc/legal.html
  32. mailto:webmaster@mactech.com
  33. mailto:progchallenge@mactech.com