5 ms·
RegEx Crossword (2013)
- M3L0NM4N 3y agoThis looks like it belongs in Guantanamo Bay more than it does on my screen.
- Jeff_Brown 3y agoThe variation in human preferences truly is wild.
- asicsp 3y agoPrevious discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26439208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26439208 (390 points | March 12, 2021 | 151 comments) See also: https://regexcrossword.com/ https://regexcrossword.com/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614847 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20614847 (various online regex tools). I wrote a TUI for interactive Python exercises (`re` and third-party `regex` modules): https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/PyRegexExercises https://github.com/learnbyexample/TUI-apps/tree/main/PyRegex...
- Already__Taken 3y agoI love these I do all I come across. I find a lot of the generated ones like to make tricks. I'm not having fun figuring out a shit font of [O0lI]+ or rules you ignore most of. that's just an entropy trick the generator uses. Hopefully this one's good
- kqr 3y agoI dislike that almost every clue starts with a variant of (something)* – like, yeah, I can make a regex crossword more difficult by starting every clue with a laundry list of things that might not even be in the solution, but that's lazy crossword crafting.
- dajt 3y agoI agree. I've managed 14 letters but it's not enough fun - every letter takes too much effort and there's no sense of dominos falling yet. I assume there is some tipping point but it feels too far off. Maybe this is why I can't get one of those ludicrously paid FAANG jobs :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mcint 3y agoI felt the same way. Furthermore, it's a little dissatisfying to not have a unique solution, in terms of characters. If you think of character sets, it's still unique, but it's a bit unsatisfying. I made more progress once I accepted (possibly) non-uniqueness and worked on finding some valid assignment, as opposed to a sole valid assignment. The last dozen clues were increasingly interesting to solve, the intersecting constraints.
- samtho 3y agoIf you’ve completed any human language crosswords before, this is a trick they use too in the form of ambiguous, common answers (e.g. “super quick, abbr” can be ASAP or STAT - for more annoyance, notice letter 3 is the same in both), usually requiring you to get crosses to figure out exactly what fits.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xeyownt 3y agoNot sure why I lost my time on this but that was fun ;-)
- benibela 3y agoMy reason is that I have to do every challenge. Perhaps that is some kind of adhd
- npn 3y agoHuh, is there more than one? This looks different from my memory
- pil0u 3y agoYou can select among 4 different puzzles at the bottom of the big hexagone. The default is the original one though.
- kzrdude 3y agoWhew, that took a good hour to solve (maybe more)
- scaradim 3y agonow that's cool...
- 112233 3y agoWhat a nice CAPTCHA!
- jonhohle 3y agoTo prove that you are a Turing machine.
- schoen 3y agoRegular expressions (in the original computer science sense) can be matched by finite-state automata!
- lemoing 3y agoYes, but filling a grid in a way that satisfies all of the regular expressions is a much harder problem than matching a single regex. Semi-related: generating fill for regular crosswords is NP-complete: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0304397523005881 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
- mcint 3y agoWell, at this scale, it would take longer to set up a SAT solver than it would for the SAT solver to list all valid solutions.
- jjice 3y agoI love these! There are more out there on the Internet and I've unfortunately done all of them more than once, so I'm craving more. I'll be diving deep into this. Not sure if this helped me get better at regular expressions or getting better at regular expressions helped me with these.
- chedoku 3y agoThen give Chedoku a try too.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoI love these too. Every day I use the iOS NYTimes Games app to play the daily round of Wordle, Spelling Bee, the mini-crossword, and Connections. We need a daily regex puzzle rotation. I have no idea how you would generate these programmatically.
- boothby 3y agoGenerating them programmatically would be fun. Regex matching is NP-complete already thanks to backreferences. But even without backreferences, rectangular regex crosswords can encode SAT problems. So, solving these hexagonal crosswords is already quite the challenge. Making them, and ensuring they have a unique solution is quite the puzzlecraft! Personally speaking, I'm delighted that more people have contributed puzzles since the last time this was posted, and I look forward to seeing more.
- serialNumber 3y agoHave you given letterboxd a shot? Can be surprisingly hard
- Feathercrown 3y agoThat was very cool... hard to start and stayed difficult throughout!
- 3c6bYDXLMj 3y agoI was a student when this came out, so I obviously remember it well. Kids with loads of free time, that were tuned to rote memorise crap like regular expressions, ate this crap for breakfast. I didn’t have the patience :)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- benibela 3y agoThat was uneventful I thought something would happen if you solve it
- nonseq 3y agoTook me a couple of hours, but it was fun!
- sinuhe69 3y agoI thought this crossword, where one can start learning regex step-by-step. A great app, though. https://regexcrossword.com/ https://regexcrossword.com/
- alonmln 3y agoI enjoyed this a lot! Took me around and hour an a half
- MrPatan 3y agoJust solved it, finally, it only took me ten years of seeing it on HN and attempting it.