About

NY Times Crossword

What is the problem?

The program is a crossword solver.
The input is a word with one or more missing letters in the form of a question-mark ("?"), for example: "?ello".
The output is a list of all the words matching that format, in this case: "Cello", "Hello", and "Jello".
The program interacts with a user on the command line.

What is the something extra?

The program will take the asterisk ("*") to represent one or more missing letters.
The program takes care of parsing any whitespace that is accidentally used at the front or end of an input string.

What did we learn from doing this?

We'll learn about various data structures such as a prefix-trees.
We'll use these data structures to store and query words.
Further more, we'll gain practice with the io monad. On startup, the program will read over a list of words in a language and create any necessary data structures.

Conclusions

We have found Haskell to be efficient at solving this problem. Haskell makes it easy to implement a recursive solution and an iterative solution likely would've been more difficult. Further, we found it easy to interact with the user using Haskell's built in libraries. The only issue we had was finding a very efficient data type to use for the dictionary, and we ended up using a regular list.

How to Run

$ ghci
GHCi, version 8.6.5: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/  :? for help

-- Load the main program with `:l main`
Prelude> :l main 

-- Call the main (starter) function once loaded with `main`
*Main> main

Welcome to UBC CrossWordHelper! 
To find answers to ythe crossword, please enter in a keyword. 
Use the '?' question-mark for any character. 
Type '/quit' to quit the program.
_

Links

CPSC 312 Wiki - CrosswordHelper: https://wiki.ubc.ca/CrossWordHelper

Github Repository: https://github.com/Haximilian/CrossWordHelper