Okay, so today I decided to tackle this “guessed crossword clue” thing. I’ve always been kinda curious about how these crossword puzzle solvers work, you know, the ones that can seemingly pull answers out of thin air. So, I figured, why not try to build one myself? Just a simple one, nothing too fancy.
First, I grabbed a dictionary. I mean, a digital dictionary, of course. Just a big text file with a ton of words, one word per line. Easy peasy. Thought process, it’s gotta look though all that stuff, right?
Then, I started coding. I picked Python because, well, it’s just what I’m comfortable with. Plus, it’s pretty good for messing around with text.
My basic idea was this: I’d give the program a clue, like “A _ _ _ E”, and it would try to find words that fit. So, the program would need to:
- Check the length of the word. It’s gotta match the number of spaces in the clue.
- Look at the letters we do know. In this case, the first letter is ‘A’ and the last is ‘E’.
- Compare that with all the words in the dictionary.
I started with a really simple loop. It just went through each word in the dictionary, one by one. For each word, it checked if the length was right. If it was, it then checked if the known letters matched. Like, if the clue was “A _ _ L E”, it would check if the first letter of the dictionary word was “A” and the last letter was “E”.
It was… slow. Like, really slow. Especially with a big dictionary. I mean, it was going through every single word. But hey, it worked! I typed in a simple clue, ” _ A _ _”, and after a bit of chugging, it spit out some possible words. “Name”, “Game”,”Same” all correct!
Of course, this is just the very beginning. I can already think of a ton of ways to make it better. Maybe use some fancy data structures to make the searching faster. Maybe add some logic to handle more complex clues. But for a first try, I’m pretty happy with it. It actually guesses crossword clues!
And there are a lot of words that can be created.
It’s not going to win any crossword competitions, but it’s a fun little project. And who knows, maybe I’ll keep tinkering with it. This just simple test shows you can make it work.
