khiner / crosswordfiller

One of the very first programs I ever made - a program to find valid english crossword fills given a grid pattern using beam search. I found as a jar file using the Wayback Machine!

Crossword filler

One of the first programs I ever wrote - a program to find valid English crossword fills given a grid pattern with optional partial completions.

This project came to mind recently and I looked around on the Wayback Machine. Turns out I posted the jar on MediaFire and linked to it on an old blog on Jan 2, 2011, and it's still there. I downloaded and opened it on my 2023 MacBook Air, and it ran! Since it's Java, I'm guessing it runs on other computers, too :)

I'm pretty sure I never put the source code online (looks like my first GH commit was almost a year later in Dec 2011), but David Walton used the Enhanced Class Decompiler Eclipse plugin, configured to use the Procyon decompiler, to recover something similar to the original source. (Thanks, David!)

Here are my vague recollections from over 13 years ago:

• It uses beam search.
• Written in Java. Looking at the releases, version 6 was the latest at the time.
• UI is Java Swing
• If I remember correctly, it doesn't render every guess on the screen, but rather every N guesses, where N < 10, since the vast majority of time was spend rendering compared to searching.
• For some reason it is very, very yellow (ah simpler times 😅)

Download the jar file and have a blast all weekend long 🤪

Or, to compile and run the decompiled source:

$ javac Display.java
$ java Display