zomh

~~~ UPDATE ~~~~

After a ~30 hours weekend coding marathon, I've just pushed a new version of the original joystick-jargon (r/gaming) and a new r/leagueoflegends puzzle live.

https://capsloq.de/crosswords/joystick-jargon

https://capsloq.de/crosswords/r/leagueoflegends

What changed?

- 5 new puzzles for r/gaming

- 6 new puzzles for r/leagueoflegends

- Old puzzles deleted

- New extraction algorithm (everything new: tokenizer, transformers, piplines, model, word and document embeddings, scoring, complete overhaul ...)

- New clue prompting

- Grid can now only contain diagonal black boxes (should guarantee intersections)

- Fixed numbering bug on the grid

- Did proof read each puzzle and some slight adjustments to guarantee puzzle integrity.

Warning: When i did proof read the League of Legends Q&A I noticed that I've never played that game so I couldn't verify everything!

Thank you very much to everyone who provided feedback to improve on v1.

I really hope you feel an increase in quality. I am looking forward for even more feedback and improving further.

Planning to use more suitable datasets in the future. It's super hard to get quality crossword list out of r/gaming.

Have fun puzzling! (please)

They talked about it in r/dota2 don't ask me why but they did :D

Have not done zero shot yet. At the moment i am experimenting with this https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.05245. Looks promising hoping to push an updated version soon but i am still fighting with it at the moment

Learnt my lesson. Truly felt (still) bad and sorry after people were saying they spent time and would not click solve easily. I only looked at it from a technical perspective and fully underestimated how serious the cross-wording community is. There was no bad intention and I will absolutely respect that from now on!

//EDIT. I've been working on it for approx. 10 hours today (still going) with the goal to put live a much better quality version. I feel the pressure and want this fixed myself. However it's quite a computational challenge i am giving my very best

TY for the feedback. I like the idea and its an interesting twist. Gamified learning is also a good market i think?

TY for the feedback. I see what you are saying about the crossword getting too niche. For now this is mostly a technical decision since its easier to train on a more specific dataset. However i agree with you that the dataset should be expanded once the quality is there

Oh, I misread your first comment. Thought you were playing crosswords for 30 years that would've been a knowledge goldmine

Thank you for that feedback. I agree NYT does this a lot better. I'll have to improve on that. Not gonna lie to you I suck at CSS/Styling/UX/UI will need to get some help regarding this. However i feel you and it's important for the fun of the game

Wanted to thank you again. I am currently working on an improved version providing more context. Your sentence "Part of the deep satisfaction in solving ..." made it into the prompt's rule-set. At this very moment I am only using the dataset of r/dota2 to make the testing easier and I look at the very first result with the new prompt:

Generated words and clues:

heroes: Characters with unique abilities in Dota 2, tasked with defeating the enemy's Ancient.

ragers: Players who overly react to in-game frustrations, often ruining the fun for everyone.

rage: A common emotion experienced by players sometimes leading to poor decision-making.

tachyons: Hypothetical particles that travel faster than light, having no place in an Ancient's mechanics.

healing: Essential support function often provided by certain heroes like Treant Protector.

burn: Refers to a mechanism used to deplete an opponent's mana, crucial in trilane strategies.

matters: In Dota 2, every decision, including hero picks, can significantly change the outcome.

fault: What a player will often blame when losing, rather than acknowledging their own mistakes.

support: Role in Dota 2 focused on helping the team, often with abilities to aid and sustain.

team: Group of players working together to win, where synergy and composition are key to victory.

Note that the Words themselves were not picked by OpenAI but rather a per-selection from the BERT Embeddings ML Algorithm but this time with more than just a word as context.

This is definitely going in the right direction. It's only sample size of 1 but i had to share it with you!

One more thing: Besides the obvious that clues and answers should make sense can you provide some insights in what makes a good crossword to you? I'd love to hear that from someone playing them for 30 years!

The algo does allow for fully automatic crossword generation, let me try to summarize the general flow:

1. Begins with an empty grid and starts placing words horizontally from the top-left corner

2. For each word placement, it verifies that valid words can be formed vertically at each intersection point

3. It maintains a list of possible letters for each cell to ensure all constraints are satisfied

4. The generator consults a dictionary to find valid words that fit the curent grid state, allowing for diverse solutions

5. If no valid word can be placed, it may decide to insert a black square, carefully checking that doesn't violate any crossword rules

6. When it reaches an dead end, the system backtracks and tries different options

7. It employs smart heuristics to guide word selection, such as favoring longer words in certain positions

8. Throughout the process it automatically adjusts parameters like word length andblack square placement to find a valid solution

There is no manual intervetion, however the quality depends heavily on the input dictionary and tunable parameters.

You right. Thank you for debugging that. And it's always the numbering 1. Definitely a bug in the algo. Will look into it

Thank you! You right, no i18n yet, I can assure you that the URL https://capsloq.de/crosswords/joystick-jargon has the only playable crosswords at this moment. The other links in the Nav are not crossword related. Will definitely do i18n maybe even the crossword themselves in the future.

TYVM for trying it out! Oh no, now I feel bad again. Please remember these are unsupervised generated clues by a Large Language Model (openai). More of a field test, however I now understand how serious you and others take crosswording. I vow to do better for the next crossword puzzles. It's not my intention to make people feel bad, sorry!

Thank you for sharing. I will check it out. And no worries regarding the speed. The website is cheating the 20 puzzles are pre-compiled so to say, the actually work was done in C++, the web server is just indexing an array of perfect puzzles at that point. TY!

TYVM for trying it out and feedback and it confirms what other users are saying. This is an unsupervised version with no human quality gate. Please consider this a starting point. That being said, I feel bad that you couldn't even enjoy it, that was not my goal. Sorry for that. I thought people would take a smile away regardless of some words/clues being bad. I have to admit i underestimated the appeal of quality. Some people say it gets at least a little bit better from puzzle #13, maybe you can get some enjoyment out of that? No worries if you are fed up at this point. Thanks for trying it out

TYVM for this feedback. I feel the exactly same way. This is purely a NON-PROOF-READ starting point, a field test of what AI can put out unsupervised. The prompt was changed in the latter puzzles those should be a tad better. But as already discussed there can be done a lot more to improve the quality of words and clues significantly.

I think i just saw it Puzzle #1 Clue #1. That's a bug in the numbering algorithm thanks for point it out.

which puzzle number are you refering to?

thank you very much! And thanks again for the clickable link i didn't even notice

Haha, true. I was sure it is "Inn" from Hearthstone Innkeeper but that's a case of LLM Hallucinations. See my other comment on how this can be improved but not solved completely imo

LLM Hallucinations are real. Admittedly for the prompt I provided just the word and some basic rules. It should be possible to increase the quality if e.g. I provide the sentence in which the word was used to the LLM. Nevertheless Hallucinations will always be a problem i think there is no way around a human quality gate in the process?

Thank you for your input. Your conceptual point on what makes crosswords fun is gold! Your practical advice is not only great but also very doable: Remember I used a 3.7million Reddit-Comments dataset which is a sub-optimal choice to generate words out of. (But i liked the headline behind it). So changing the dataset to something you mentioned (game compendiums, manuals, faqs) will probably increase the answers significantly.

Edit: At some point I was unsure myself, if i don't know certain things about gaming or if the AI is making things up, haha, so this feedback is extremely valuable for me thank you

Thank you for trying! Please see my reply on the other comment it fits here as well. This is a non proof read version and i agree with you consider this a starting point. Also feel free the try out the later puzzles (10+) i changed the prompt at some point because i noticed the same thing.

Thank you for trying. You are absolutely right. In my defense i released the very first 20 puzzles without proof reading them. I just wanted to see what the AI can deliver as a starting point and get an idea if crossword players would like or hate the general idea of it. I've just started seriously playing it myself and some clues are indeed strange. The clues were generated by gpt-4o. You can try later puzzles i did some prompt adjustments because i noticed the forced "in games" after 10 puzzles or so. It gets a bit better at later puzzles. Thank you for the feedback