Watson reminds me greatly of Proverb, a crossword-solving program. It works in a similar way: a number of different heuristics come up with possible clue solut

Watson reminds me greatly of Proverb, a crossword-solving program. It works in a similar way: a number of different heuristics come up with possible clue solutions, then a ranking algorithm prunes them by probability. Like Watson, some heuristics just do raw text search, while others are specialized to common kinds of wordplay. Proverb is able to solve about 90% of the clues in an average week of New York Times puzzles. Of course, Proverb has an advantage over Watson: the letters of intersecting clues are dependent, so the probabilities of different clues reinforce each other, giving better estimates of likely letters. http://www.oneacross.com/proverb/ http://www.oneacross.com/proverb/ (http://www.oneacross.com/ http://www.oneacross.com/ has a limited version of Proverb online which can guess at individual crossword clues -- invaluable if you get stuck on one.)