Cryptic Crossword Solver

Using AI and language parsing techniques to solve British-style cryptic crosswords in Haskell.

  *Solver> solve $ clue 1
  [Answer ("escort",ParsedClue (Clue ("companion shredded corset",6),"companion",[],AnagC ["shredded"] ["corset"]))]

Running it

Setting up the Thesaurus

Unless you're able to load the whole thesaurus into memory (at the cost of, like, 6GB, or something – doesn't work for me) then you'll need to run the following.

  $ cd data/
  $ python create_thesaurus_files.py

If you do want to do it in memory, then uncomment out the THESAURUS IN MEMORY section in Thesaurus.hs

Via Docker and Docker-Compose

  $ docker-compose build solver
  $ docker-compose run solver

To Do

Functioning

• Get all the missing clue types working
  • Firsts
  • Lasts
  • Before
  • After
  • "Small" (small female = "f")
• Pull in a proper memoize library, and memoize the eval function
• Print the Answers in a nicer way
• Support multi-word clues?

Data

• Move the thesaurus function to be a system call rather than via files
• Make a more expansive, extensible thesaurus + wordlist
  • "X is a Y" types things -> I'm missing Ibsen, Scorsese, BSE, Waterloo (battle + song) etc.
  • More abbreviations -> Ag = silver
  • Phrasal verbs? "Expand on" + conjugates
  • Currently have "hesitate" = "think twice" but not past tense
  • Have okapi -> animal, but not "rainforest animal" –– Maybe ignore adjectives???
• Scrape the web / books for more indicators words

Testing/Results

• Start gathering a better benchmark suite – scrape the Times, Guardian, Telegraph etc.
• Make a function to run solver against the benchmarks: at a different level of timeout