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The punchline to this story is that a few years ago the Times stopped scrambling their .puz files, making all this reverse-engineering work largely irrelevant.
by bbanyc 13y ago
The punchline to this story is that a few years ago the Times stopped scrambling their .puz files, making all this reverse-engineering work largely irrelevant.
(At the time I was using a modified version of the "xword" program in Debian's repo, which didn't detect whether the file was scrambled. In other words, it treated every letter as wrong because it didn't match the enciphered grid. I ended up hacking in some code to detect these files and disable the check/reveal features when playing them.)
- breadbox 13y agoVery true! I mentioned that fact the first time I gave this presentation, but it wound up being an anticlimactic ending, so I chose to omit it from the written essay. (And at this point, the focus is more about the process of reverse-engineering anyway.) EDIT: To be precise, there were still a few other crossword publishers using the scrambling feature. None as important as the New York Times, though, of course.
- StavrosK 13y agoProblem solving is its own reward!