Experiments in AI-generation of crosswords
Hi HN, I've been experimenting on-and-off over the years trying to automatically generate crosswords [1]. Recently I've been feeling like my results are good enough that I want to share them and see what other people think. I'm not trying to claim that these could appear in, say, the NYT in their current state, but honestly the velocity of progress makes me feel like I will inevitably be able to automatically generate NYT-quality crosswords within just a year or so. A write-up is here: https://abstractnonsense.com/crosswords.html And you can play the crosswords here:…
In plain words
This project uses AI to automatically generate crossword puzzles. The creator has been developing the system over many years and now offers playable crosswords on a dedicated website where users can solve them and compare times on leaderboards. The generated puzzles are still in experimental stages but represent ongoing progress in automated crossword creation through machine learning techniques.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I've been experimenting on-and-off over the years trying to automatically generate crosswords [1]. Recently I've been feeling like my results are good enough that I want to share them and see what other people think. I'm not trying to claim that these could appear in, say, the NYT in their current state, but honestly the velocity of progress makes me feel like I will inevitably be able to automatically generate NYT-quality crosswords within just a year or so. A write-up is here: https://abstractnonsense.com/crosswords.html And you can play the crosswords here: https://crosswordracing.com (They should work well on both desktop and mobile, and there's a leader-board for each crossword if you want to leave your name when you solve one). [1]: Just in case anyone is interested, my very first attempt at this problem was way back in 2006! I used multiple wordlists (e.g. list of British monarchs, with reign dates), and wrote little functions to generate clues from each list (e.g. "British monarch who ruled from {date1} to {date2}"). Even with randomized synonym substitution and similar tricks, this approach was too labor-intensive, and the results too robotic, for it to work well. Can't complain though, that project led to me getting hired as the first engineer at Justin.TV!
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