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.
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.
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.
