Summary: Analysing the Behaviour of Crossword Puzzles
Adi Botea and Anbulagan
NICTA and the Australian National University
Canberra, Australia
{adi.botea|anbulagan}@nicta.com.au
Abstract
Crosswords for entertainment have been an ex-
tremely popular puzzle across the world for many
decades. The automated generation of crosswords
grids is a multi-disciplinary artificial intelligence
domain. The puzzle has been used as a bench-
mark in constraint programming. Recently, there
has been a games-specific interest, aiming at devel-
oping powerful crosswords-specific engines. De-
spite its importance, no detailed study of this do-
main has been available in the past.
In this paper, we study the domain dynamics when
the dictionary size and the number of blocked cells
vary, showing a multi-dimensional phase transition
phenomenon. We then introduce a model counting

Source: Anbulagan, A. - National ICT Australia & Computer Sciences Laboratory, Australian National University

Collections: Computer Technologies and Information Sciences