Re: [seul-edu] Crossword Application?

[Manuel Gutierrez Algaba <algaba@gmx.net>]

El Jue 10 Ene 2002 19:27, escribió:
> Les Richardson wrote:
> > Is there a good crossword puzzle generator in the open source world?
>
> There's <http://crossword.sourceforge.net/> and
> <http://crosswords.50g.com/> by our own Manuel Gutiérrez Algaba.

Well, technically speaking the generator is not available, it's only 
available the generated crosswords. So the "product" is GPL not 
the "engines". Why don't I put the engine in the GPL ?

Well, it's a complex issue, but it can be sum up into one thing : time.

Currently all crosswords.50g.com is generated by scripts, so it's trivial for 
me to release millions of crosswords... if necessary . 
But, you know, the scripts are all of them in Spanish, and some of them are 
not trivial. The algorithm used to generate the crosswords is very primitive
but it makes the job, it can be tuned and have a couple of variables. 

Every release of crosswords have been warmly welcomed by the community, even 
some people send emails with suggestions, but nobody has ever sent lists of 
words, so I haven't spent any time in documenting and translating the 
generators into English because I thought nobody was going to use them. 
I've seen other generators, btw, crosswords generators are not easy to find 
in the internet. Mine works well with small sets of words, it can work with 
long words, others use large sets of words. 

Technically speaking crosswords.50g.com aren't crosswords, since not all the 
grid is fill with words. 

It'd be "reasonable" easy to make some test-like games using the very same 
data base. 
To use free "dict" was in my agenda too, but as I say, time. 

I've thought about going commercial too... But i don't know if it's a waste 
of time, the only income would be by  hits and ads... And that takes a lot 
of time to get, till, i think it's possible. 

I've minimized the time required to release new version of 
crosswords.50g.com,...
 a couple of hours and I could augment crosswords enough to justify a 
freshmeat announcement, ... but even so, I haven't had the time .

By the way, all of it it's programmed in python, even the generator, it's 
damned slow , but so beautiful, imo, that rocks. 

To create a documentation and release the sources in spanish would take me 
about 20 hours, being realistic, or even more.  I don't know, it's all a 
matter of time and interest. 

---
MGA