![]() ![]() If you know you have a 5-letter word starting with "app", it's quite easy to use: grep '^app.$' words.txt Mine ended up being written in shell script (believe it or not) and using the dictionary that came from Linux as a word search tool. It's a lot easier to locate words with letters at known positions than to evaluate those letters at any starting position within a word. Similarly for words where you have known letters at any positions. That way, you would know that "app" was the start of the word and be able to limit your searches to those starting with "app", not every word that has "app" in it. Once you have the pattern, then you start finding words to place in it. Things like being symmetrical around one of the diagonals and disallowing a square of four white cells (to ease the task of selecting suitable words). If you look at most crosswords, they tend to follow certain rules to make it easier. ![]() Trying to fit words into a grid while creating the pattern on the fly is very time consuming and prone to errors. The first thing you should do is design your patterns (blacks where you can't put letters and whites where you can). ![]() I had a database of words and their clues which could be sorted by times used (so that I wouldn't tend to get duplicate crosswords on subsequent runs). I've actually written a crossword program before (cryptic but the theory behind the construction is identical). ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |