One of my ways of preserving some semblance of sanity is to
do the TIMES crossword puzzle each
day. Mondays are dead easy, then each
day is a bit harder, until Friday and Saturday are really challenging. I do them in ink, since pencil does not read
as easily. The Thursday puzzle always
has an interesting gimmick in it, sometimes very hard to decipher. The Sunday
puzzle is very big but only about as hard as the Wednesday puzzle.
On Sunday, there is sometimes a DoubleCrostic, and that is
where the problem arises. I love doing
DoubleCrostics but I hate filling in
the letters and I am constantly making mistakes. I have long thought that if I were as rich as
Bezos, I would hire someone whose whole job would be to fill in the DoubleCrostic
letters for me.
And then it struck me: This is a perfect job for an App. It should be child’s play to design an App
that automatically links the letters in the answers to the clues to the places
in the puzzle where they go. Surely
there must be an online DoubleCrostic site that does that.
Anybody?
If you subscribe to the Times crossword puzzle online (which requires paying extra), the NYT's own software does this. The subscription gives you access to the archives, too, going back to 1999 in the case of the acrostic (and November 1993 for the regular puzzle).
ReplyDeleteYes, the subscription gets one quite a lot. KenKen is more fun online and crossword work has less overhead. https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/acrostic/2019/05/12
ReplyDeletebut does it automatically fill in the letters in a Doublecrostic???
ReplyDelete@RPW Yes, of course it does. That's what computers are for.
ReplyDelete