Re:I was terrible at crosswords so I built an AI to do them
by tzs on Monday May 03, 2021 @04:35PM
(#27030298)
> Some puzzles have rebus answers, where more than one letter will fill a single square. Itβs not obvious when this is the case.
Another deviation from the "one letter per square, all in a line" that they sometimes have is the bent answer. I recall one for instance where there were several isolated black squares, and some answers that ran into these continued after a 90 degree turn. So you might have 5 spaces to the left of the black square, but the answer was actually 9 letters with the last 4 written upward from the black square.
As with rebuses, they don't tell you that a puzzle has this sort of thing. You are left to figure it out on your own. For that 90 degree turn example, you'd probably get it by filling in enough of the words that cross it to notice that the 5 space section matches the start of a 9 letter word that would work, and notice that the 4 letters that would complete that word are going up from the black square. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence, and then you'd go look at other places where the answers seemed to short and see that same trick works there.
I don't think I've seen any the have both rebuses and non-linear answers. That would be a nightmare.
Another deviation from the "one letter per square, all in a line" that they sometimes have is the bent answer. I recall one for instance where there were several isolated black squares, and some answers that ran into these continued after a 90 degree turn. So you might have 5 spaces to the left of the black square, but the answer was actually 9 letters with the last 4 written upward from the black square.
As with rebuses, they don't tell you that a puzzle has this sort of thing. You are left to figure it out on your own. For that 90 degree turn example, you'd probably get it by filling in enough of the words that cross it to notice that the 5 space section matches the start of a 9 letter word that would work, and notice that the 4 letters that would complete that word are going up from the black square. That seems unlikely to be a coincidence, and then you'd go look at other places where the answers seemed to short and see that same trick works there.
I don't think I've seen any the have both rebuses and non-linear answers. That would be a nightmare.