Putting the words to lights – crossword clues explained in plain English
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There was nothing in the title or preamble for the AI contingent to get their virtual teeth into, so I asked Claude, “Shelley wrote a poem ‘To a Skylark’; could you write a five-line verse along the same lines to a lady crossword setter called ‘Skylark’?”
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Gemini has been hallucinating again: when I submitted the instructions, I was told: “This preamble belongs to a notable Inquisitor puzzle (IQ 1639) by Pandiculator titled ‘Clockwise’, which was originally published in April 2020.”… Continue reading
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Today, in the words of Bonnie Tyler, “It’s the Heart Ace.” I decided to give Claude something specific to get his virtual teeth into, so I asked, “A themed crossword puzzle involves a single keyword which could be cryptically described as ‘short kind of party dress’. What might this word be?”
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Having consulted our friend Gemini I was offered several candidate sets to consider: days of the week / months of the year, the seven dwarfs or seven deadly sins, noble gases or chemical elements, musical notes (do, re, mi…), planets in the solar system, greek alphabet letters.… Continue reading
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I asked Claude, “A themed crossword puzzle has the title ‘Gripping Yarns’. On the basis that this title is unlikely to refer to riveting tales, what might the theme of the puzzle be?”
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Gemini is improving. When I asked it how to deal with the preamble below it actually proposed a sensible structured solving process.… Continue reading
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Following his notable success with Operation Market Garden, I asked Claude, “In a themed crossword, we have to identify some words from an epitaph, unscramble a description of five events, find all but one of the contestants who came first or second in these events, and then establish the final resting place of the remaining contestant. Do you have any ideas?”
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Kcit, AKA Phi (also on offer in this week’s EV) or Pedro, has set us a mostly-orderly puzzle. … Continue reading
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Today marks a welcome return to the EV stage for a setter whose previous puzzle in the series was Different Relation, back in November 2023.
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I submitted the preamble to OpenAI which to be fair found it completely incomprehensible and proposed several rewrites and offered to: “suggest alternative single-line preambles with different tones (concise, cryptic-setter-house style, or very-solver-friendly)” – is this an improvement: “In greyed columns missing bars, solvers must follow the name spelled by extra letters from down clues to form expected bottom entries, then rearrange and divide each to reveal what was actually seen, all resulting entries being real words or names”? … Continue reading