Crossword generators - source code

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• Christian Schulte's crossword generator (cpp) [new]
  
• cross/
  Rob Mayoff's crossword generator (aka "1down") severely hacked by me to use a DAWG, thus speeding it up by quite a chunk. Rob did later make similar mods to his own original program, but when last I spoke to him, he had lost the files.
• cword/
  Robert Tappan Morris's (Yes, that RTM) crossword builder. Acceptably fast. Can work around already placed words. Try it online.
• Arc Consistency Crossword Compiler
  Most recent addition to this page. Hosted at Sourceforge
• hsr_crossword
  Source code pack for a crossword application written for a NeXT machine by H. Scott Roy (hsr@cs.stanford.edu)
  The program is intended to provide a testing ground for different search algorithms. It acts as a visual tool to identify the strengths and weaknesses of a particular method. Doubtless it can find excellent use in an introductory artificial intelligence course. With a little work and proper understanding of the code, one can add new search algorithms to the program.
  This is written in Objective C (from the NeXT system).
• gatekeeper/grid_generator.lisp
  This is a grid generator written in common lisp by Don Geddis (geddis@cs.Stanford.edu).
• gatekeeper/openwindows.sh
  This is an American-style crossword puzzle generator/solver with nice graphics and dictionary help. Compiles on a Sun Openwindows 4.1.2 platform. It was written by John Staples (staples@csg.lbl.gov).
• Clueless Crosswords
  Crossword solver (known grid, known answers - best fit)
• Maxiscore
  See Jean-Charles Meyrignac's highly customised crossword filler for a subset problem called "Maxiscore".
  (See his file "mail.txt" and look particularly at the examples at the end of the file)
• WordJunction
  Windows program to create crosswords and word-find puzzles. Home page.
• gatekeeper/latex_formatter.txt
  This is a small C language utility to create LaTex crossword output posted to rec.puzzles.crosswords in 1992 by MT Raghunath (mtr@cs.berkeley.edu).
• spell/SpellLib/wild.c
  A small utility to search for words, using wildcards. Useful in manually solving crosswords, or could be built into a utility to do so. (For instance similar code was modified and made the basis of my cryptogram solver)
• Carl Hayne's Java Applet
  Here's an pretty crossword display in Java that is free! (from here)
  (Compare it to the commercial Crossword Express applet below). This is a hand-crafted applet for one particular crossword. What is needed is an applet generator that takes a crossword definition file and builds a source like this. (Or indeed does it all on the fly)
• Crossword Compiler derived from Sik's
  This is available in source code with some of the algorithms derived from "Sik's Thesis" below. (unpacked local copy)
• Phylum Tea's open source crossword code Phylum Tea (try anagramming it...) writes commercial crossword code, but has generously released some open source code for completing crossword puzzles to the net. Read the tutorial then download the source code.
• David A. Madore's grid generator Pretty nice grid generator, working with CSP. Short and quite fast. It will fill grids with holes placed as the queens' problem (but it's easy to change that). Your dictionary must contain all one word letters, otherwise it won't find anything.
• Filling with dancing links
• A freeware Linux solver Seems to fill using CSP (Constraint Satisfaction Problem) algorithm. Source code here
• Articles on crossword solving for Romanian crosswords No code, just some articles.

• potm/crozzle/
  Fit a list of words into a 20x20 area, with as much overlap as possible. Note this code could easily be adapted to generate highly criss-crossed Scrabble layouts.
• kuro5hin programming contest about crozzles
• potm/old-problems/scrabblesquare.txt
  Fit as many words into a 5x5 square as you can.
• Educational Crossword Compiler by Nandor Sieben <Nandor.Sieben(at)NAU.EDU>
  old C code to generate puzzles from Gatekeeper Archive. Requires also puzmac.tex
  An updated version of the source is available here. Note: although this program generates TeX, it is not simply a formatter - it is a proper crossword generator. It takes a list of words (and optionally clues) and tries to pack those words as best as it can into the space available with maximum overlapping. Note it does not attempt to build a crossword to a predefined grid, so the output (see here for an example) is generally irregular.

• The Probabilistic Cruciverbalist
  Impressive AI project on solving American-style non-cryptic crosswords. (Demo)
• One Across
  Also offers some help in solving American-style non-cryptic crosswords. I suspect this works by a relatively simple inference engine using something like wordnet to find common links between words in the clues.
  NOTE: Greg Keim is working on both Proverb and OneAcross above. (pdf paper)
• Crossword Maestro
  Commercial cryptic crossword solver.
• Themed Crossword Generator Project
• Sik's Thesis (he also has a great links page although many links are unfortunately now out of date - it was written in 1997)
  Veteran word-gamers might like to study the section in his thesis where he reinvents the DAWG data structure rather poorly - the biggest mistake being that he separates each word by length thus losing a huge amount of tail compression. Also he's not too hot on the implementation of tries using indexed arrays versus linked lists. (cf Liang's packed trie algorithm). Small nit-picks like this notwithstanding, it is a good paper and worth a read.
• gatekeeper/berker.txt
  This is the text of a paper co-authored by Ilan Berker (berker@wpi.edu) on automatic crossword generators.
  Although the paper says "in Turkish", it applies to any language.
• zafer/zafer.pdf
  File zafer.ps from the Gatekeeper archive converted into pdf format. Report (in English) on a Turkish crossword generator project. (Different from the one above)
• Commercial Danish word-game/anagram/word-lookup site
  
• Fitwords Clueless crossword puzzles.
• Crossword Wizard Macintosh crossword generator (including clueless crosswords.) Commercial. See the manual for more info.
• Java Crossword and Anagram Generator I couldn't get it to work so I have not bothered to look at the class files with Jad.
• Download Express See what else is out there on the net with this download search engine.
• JARS (Java archive) Or this one.
• About.com's list of crossword software And some more links to crossword software from about.com (aka miningco)
• Crossword Express
  Commercial crossword generator with pretty Java web display. (Actually, they're not all as pretty as that one)
  Later news: it turns out that the good-looking display for .cwe files is from a clone of the program written in Java. Here's the author's crossword generator page and here is his crossword display page. (assorted other stuff)
• Online Crosswords Here's quite a good Java applet for interactive crosswords and word-search puzzles.
• USA Today puzzles on Palm Pilot A perl script and palmpilot program to convert USA Today format puzzles into something that can be played on the Palm Pilot. (Also Mac version)
• Mirror of now-defunct DEC GateKeeper crossword archive site
• Across Lite LaTeX support
  Also from the DEC GateKeeper crossword archive site, a package to format "Across Lite" puzzles in Latex. Notable to us primarily for its C source code, by Bob Newell, to decode Across Lite .puz files.
• Crossword shapes/grids/layouts archive site Useful grids if you are creating your own crossword puzzles. There are many more of these on the net, some in readable formats, some in proprietary formats. I will not be listing any in proprietary formats unless I can also include a source program that can decode them properly.
• The old rec.puzzles.crosswords FAQ I believe this has not been supported for some years but may still contain a few pieces of timeless wisdom.
• Gary Meehan's paper on crossword constraints Constructing Crossword Grids: Use of Heuristics vs Constraints (with Professor Peter Gray). Proceedings of Expert Systems 97: Research and Development in Expert Systems XIV, SGES Publications, 1997, pp 159-174.
  (what happens when you think too hard about something instead of just doing it. Would have got more benefit from thinking about the data structure than the algorithms)
• Constraints in filling crosswords Brief lecture notes and a worked example.
• Russian crossword generator (and links to a solver at Crossword Magazine)
• CPT: Crossword Power Tools Commercial crossword editing kit, written in Java (source not distributed, but I guess if anyone was being real nosy they could see how it worked using a Java decompiler) for Linux and Windows (or anything with a Java runtime I guess). Local copy here. [Collection of crossword shapes for this code]
• XWord Studio crossword generator Greg Chapman's Macintosh shareware program. No sources, but there is a writeup of the code.