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My dad was a big crossword puzzler. I asked him if he thought that if you pick one of two possible answers to the first clue whether it would be possible to sol

My dad was a big crossword puzzler. I asked him if he thought that if you pick one of two possible answers to the first clue whether it would be possible to solve the entire puzzle one way or another way. He sat down and created a series of puzzles with "themes", e.g. "north", "south" or "Schiller", "Goethe", where all the major words were from one or the other theme. Anyway, it would be interesting what the AI would do with this, would there be two hotspots in the solution space, one for each variant?

mcherm 4y ago
Also famously the November 5 1996 NYT puzzle where a clue about the newly elected president could be solved either CLINTON or BOBDOLE and all the crossing words had two solutions. If they trained the AI on the NYT archive then they would have the results of testing it on this one.
- sp332 4y ago
  It's been done a few times since then. February 6th this year had STAR TREK/STAR WARS across the center.
- zwieback 4y ago
  Cool, I'll have to tell my dad about this before it's too late. His versions were many years before this but published in Germany so maybe totally independent.
evanb 4y ago
I do the puzzle every day. I've been collecting clues that have caused me trouble, a wrong answer. I hope someday to be able to construct such a puzzle with one set of clues and two complete but incompatible solutions. A thesaurus will get you far, but will never get you OREOCOOKIE and CHESSBOARD as answers for "It's all black and white" (from today's puzzle).