PUZZLE LINKS: iPuz Download | Online Solver
Some of you might remember our very silly take on meatdaddy’s Tabula Rasa project. We didn’t really do anything interesting there, just taking the four most important words (as per TF-IDF) found in clues for each entry and presenting them in descending order of importance. The end result was funny, but the computer-generated clues didn’t really look like clues. The thing is … I don’t know how to make them look more like clues. But I know someone who does!
Rose is an excellent crossword constructor and a natural language processing expert who I was thrilled to learn wanted to work on a better version of a clue-writing bot. I sent her the code that created the original AI clues and she almost immediately got back to me with a better version. In fact, that version was too good at writing clues, so she made it a little dumber and the result is what you see here. We mostly let the code do its thing, with only two minor exceptions where it resulted in difficult crossings. Oh, and there are four other exceptions, but you’ll be able to identify those.
Thanks to Norah for testing this one! We’ll hear more from her soon …