Crossword Puzzles as a Constraint Problem

Anbulagan,; Botea, Adi

doi:10.1007/978-3-540-85958-1_40

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Following these, the crossword generation was considered an example of a constraint satisfaction problem [9]. The variables consist of the empty grid positions to be filled up and the values are dictionary words and/or phrases that can be placed in these positions.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tries-Based Parallel Solutions for Generating Perfect Crosswords Grids

Niculescu

Ştefănică

2022

Algorithms

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A general crossword grid generation is considered an NP-complete problem and theoretically it could be a good candidate to be used by cryptography algorithms. In this article, we propose a new algorithm for generating perfect crosswords grids (with no black boxes) that relies on using tries data structures, which are very important for reducing the time for finding the solutions, and offers good opportunity for parallelisation, too. The algorithm uses a special tries representation and it is very efficient, but through parallelisation the performance is improved to a level that allows the solution to be obtained extremely fast. The experiments were conducted using a dictionary of almost 700,000 words, and the solutions were obtained using the parallelised version with an execution time in the order of minutes. We demonstrate here that finding a perfect crossword grid could be solved faster than has been estimated before, if we use tries as supporting data structures together with parallelisation. Still, if the size of the dictionary is increased by a lot (e.g., considering a set of dictionaries for different languages—not only for one), or through a generalisation to a 3D space or multidimensional spaces, then the problem still could be investigated for a possible usage in cryptography.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%