RegEx Crossword (2013) | Hacker News Reader

RegEx Crossword (2013)

jimbly.github.io

155 pointsnabla931 comments

This looks like it belongs in Guantanamo Bay more than it does on my screen.

The variation in human preferences truly is wild.

I love these I do all I come across. I find a lot of the generated ones like to make tricks. I'm not having fun figuring out a shit font of [O0lI]+ or rules you ignore most of. that's just an entropy trick the generator uses. Hopefully this one's good

I dislike that almost every clue starts with a variant of (something)* – like, yeah, I can make a regex crossword more difficult by starting every clue with a laundry list of things that might not even be in the solution, but that's lazy crossword crafting.

I agree. I've managed 14 letters but it's not enough fun - every letter takes too much effort and there's no sense of dominos falling yet. I assume there is some tipping point but it feels too far off.

Maybe this is why I can't get one of those ludicrously paid FAANG jobs :)

I felt the same way. Furthermore, it's a little dissatisfying to not have a unique solution, in terms of characters. If you think of character sets, it's still unique, but it's a bit unsatisfying.

I made more progress once I accepted (possibly) non-uniqueness and worked on finding some valid assignment, as opposed to a sole valid assignment.

The last dozen clues were increasingly interesting to solve, the intersecting constraints.

If you’ve completed any human language crosswords before, this is a trick they use too in the form of ambiguous, common answers (e.g. “super quick, abbr” can be ASAP or STAT - for more annoyance, notice letter 3 is the same in both), usually requiring you to get crosses to figure out exactly what fits.

I love these! There are more out there on the Internet and I've unfortunately done all of them more than once, so I'm craving more. I'll be diving deep into this.

Not sure if this helped me get better at regular expressions or getting better at regular expressions helped me with these.

I love these too.

Every day I use the iOS NYTimes Games app to play the daily round of Wordle, Spelling Bee, the mini-crossword, and Connections.

We need a daily regex puzzle rotation. I have no idea how you would generate these programmatically.

Have you given letterboxd a shot? Can be surprisingly hard

Generating them programmatically would be fun. Regex matching is NP-complete already thanks to backreferences. But even without backreferences, rectangular regex crosswords can encode SAT problems. So, solving these hexagonal crosswords is already quite the challenge. Making them, and ensuring they have a unique solution is quite the puzzlecraft!

Personally speaking, I'm delighted that more people have contributed puzzles since the last time this was posted, and I look forward to seeing more.

Then give Chedoku a try too.

Whew, that took a good hour to solve (maybe more)

That was uneventful

I thought something would happen if you solve it

I thought this crossword, where one can start learning regex step-by-step.

A great app, though.

https://regexcrossword.com/

Not sure why I lost my time on this but that was fun ;-)

My reason is that I have to do every challenge. Perhaps that is some kind of adhd

What a nice CAPTCHA!

To prove that you are a Turing machine.

Regular expressions (in the original computer science sense) can be matched by finite-state automata!

Yes, but filling a grid in a way that satisfies all of the regular expressions is a much harder problem than matching a single regex.

Semi-related: generating fill for regular crosswords is NP-complete: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...

Well, at this scale, it would take longer to set up a SAT solver than it would for the SAT solver to list all valid solutions.

Took me a couple of hours, but it was fun!

Just solved it, finally, it only took me ten years of seeing it on HN and attempting it.

That was very cool... hard to start and stayed difficult throughout!

Huh, is there more than one? This looks different from my memory

You can select among 4 different puzzles at the bottom of the big hexagone. The default is the original one though.

I enjoyed this a lot! Took me around and hour an a half

now that's cool...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26439208 (390 points | March 12, 2021 | 151 comments)

See also: https://regexcrossword.com/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614847 (various online regex tools).

I wrote a TUI for interactive Python exercises (`re` and third-party `regex` modules): https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/PyRegex...

I was a student when this came out, so I obviously remember it well. Kids with loads of free time, that were tuned to rote memorise crap like regular expressions, ate this crap for breakfast.

I didn’t have the patience :)

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