Abstract

The construction of a program that generates crossword puzzles is discussed. The aim of this research is to draw conclusions that apply to conjunctive search generally, and the experimental results obtained in the crossword-puzzle domain lead us to the following: (1) Lookahead is extremely important when solving conjunctive queries, (2) Compile-time control of search is far less effective than its run-time counterpart, and (3) Connectivity is best used as a backtracking heuristic and not as a heuristic that determines which of a particular set of conjuncts should be expanded next. 1 Introduction Appearances notwithstanding, this is not a paper about crossword puzzles. It is a paper about search. More specifically, it is a paper about conjunctive search in large databases. What we have done is to write a program that generates crossword puzzles by filling words into an empty frame. For frame sizes greater than 4 \Theta 4, the associated search space is large enough to make brute force ...

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