Do people design the puzzles or is there a computer program that does it. If the latter, how would a computer construct an “easy” puzzle vs. a “hard” puzzle?
Crossword puzzles…
are PEOPLE!
The documentary Wordplay shows a puzzlemaker creating a puzzle that eventually runs in the NY Times. He made his by hand, and it’s fascinating to watch.
I seriously doubt a computer could construct a puzzle that was worth a sh*t. I suspect it would be ten times harder to program the computer to make a worthwhile puzzle than to just make the puzzle itself.
Well how much computer aid do cruciverbalists use? I can think of several tasks in creating a standard American puzzle that could be computer aided (listed in increasing difficulty):
- Support for laying out the entries, blocks, and entering the clues/definitions.
- Integrated list of legal words and phrases. If you have a clue that has a few letters filled in, the software could list all words that would fit.
- Integrated list of clues for the entires. So if you enter ‘aria’, the software could provide a list of possible clues.
- An extension of #3 above: weighted list of clues for the entries. The list of clues would have a weight in terms of difficulty. The software could then assess the potential difficulty of the whole puzzle. Or it could balance the difficulty of the puzzle by ensuring sections of the puzzle were not filled with only hard or easy clues.
- A real-time database of 2-4 above. As a builder creates his puzzle, the words and clues would be added to the database so that it would grow over time. Builders would still choose the core clues and entires (as well as a theme for example), but would use the software to complete the filler portions of the puzzle.
I don’t think this software is particularly hard to create and wouldn’t be surprised if someone has done it for fun. However, my guess is there isn’t a lot of demand for it. The few professional cruciverbalists would be more effective than the software. Beyond that, who would by such a program?
Anyway, this is all speculation and I am interested in any factual answers to the OP. I apologize if I hijacked too much.
Almost any worthwhile program is harder to produce than doing its job a few times manually. The reason they are created is because the job needs to be done multiple times.
(Paging twickster…)
I don’t have personal experience, but from what I’ve read, nowadays some crossword constructors still do it completely by hand, while many others use computer programs that do some or all of the work of filling the puzzle grid with cross words; and the puzzles in at least some of the lower-end markets (like the cheaper puzzle magazines) are completely computer-generated.
You may want to read Matt Gaffney’s book Gridlock: Crossword Puzzles and the Mad Geniuses Who Create Them. Chapter 6 (“Are Humans Necessary”) chronicles a John Henry-like contest between two crossword constructors with vs. two without computer programs, to see who could produce the better-quality crossword.
As for how a computer could make “easy” vs. “hard” puzzles, the words in its database could be ranked according to obscurity, and the computer could be programmed to try to use less obscure words for an easy puzzle than for a hard one.
And part of the difficulty level comes from the trickiness of the clues, which holds true whether a human being is writing the clues specifically for the words in a newly-made crossword, or whether there’s a database of clues/definitions that a computer selects from to go with the grid it has generated. See twickster’s old thread You too can write puzzle clues! for the distinction between easy, medium, and hard clues, and plenty of examples.
I haven’t constructed crosswords regularly in ten years, but even then, there were software packages that could do nearly all the work for you. And the software is a LOT better now than it was then.
That said, many of the best known and most respected creators still use pencil and paper.
Most constructors are somewhere in the middle. A typical constructor using software would probably come up with a clever theme and 4 lengthy entries that fit the theme. Then, he’d let the software fill in the rest of the grid with standard 3, 4 and 5 letter words.
After that, the constructor’s real job would be to come up with interesting clues for the words the software has filled in for him.
I want to emphasize Astorians’ last point. An enjoyable crossword might have a theme, or might not. If you can create a theme and then use a computer to fill out the rest of the puzzle is one thing.
The clues are another thing all together. They make the puzzle.
The NYTimes, makes their puzzles progressively difficult over the course of a week. Part of that is construction, but most of it is clues. I think a good crossword puzzle editor could take a Monday puzzle and make it a Friday or Saturday puzzle simply by making the clues more ambiguous or subtle. This can all be done within certain rules that regular solvers understand by custom.
So my take is that it’s the clues, not the grid itself, that makes a puzzle challenging.
Now, of course one could program a computer to use completely obscure words with standard definitions; that would be hard, but not enjoyable.
The clever connection between the clues and the grid is everything.
Here are some other twists on hard vs. easy puzzles.
As others have mentioned, the difficulty lies not only in the words in the puzzle, but in the clues. So, a puzzle that uses a lot of obscure factoids and uncommon words will be more difficult, regardless of the clues. A puzzle with common words can be made more difficult by tougher clues.
When I was a kid doing puzzles, it seemed a common convention to have words that were slightly misspelled and the clue would end with “var.” meaning “variation.” That’s (a) a lazy puzzle maker and (b) really tough to solve. This practice seems to have faded over the years, so thankfully it’s not an issue any more, at least with the puzzles I work.
Finally, I know the NYTimes puzzles are considered the apex of the form, but I’ve come to dislike them because of the theme issue. I like a theme where you can catch on to what it is after getting one or two filled in, then be able to actively solve the rest. With the NYTimes it is common to have a theme that is one long quotation broken into pieces, or, worse, a made up quotation broken up. If you don’t know the quotation, you can’t solve it, you just have to fill it in by working the cross-clues. Pah. 
One thing that can make a puzzle more difficult is the use of certain conventions in the clues that frequent puzzle-solvers will know well, but which may stump novice solvers. The use of a question mark at the end of a clue, for example, or otherwise obscure words or facts that pop up over and over in puzzles that a veteran solver knows by heart. They usually pop up because they’re unusual letter combinations.
Also, “English” crosswords are a little different than American-style crosswords, in that the clues are stranger and more punny. American puzzles will throw in clues like this (the ones marked with a question mark), especially in the theme clues, but they’re more common in English puzzles I’m lead to believe. If you’ve ever worked a word puzzle from Harper’s magazine, you’ve had a taste of that. I still remember the clue from a Harper’s puzzle I worked 25 years or so ago: Q: “Dead relatives’ corpses?” A: antibodies
snork
I agree that a quote theme is harder because you cannot use previous themed answers to help with future themed answers, but a quote has its own advantage – it is a sentence made up of mostly regular words. You can often guess several letters or whole words, even if you don’t yet recognize the quote.
I used to write crossword puzzles for a local paper and used a program (this was a long time ago and it was running on Windows 3.1). I tried to do it by hand, but the eraser marks over and over made it too difficult. There was an auto fill where it would fill in the rest of the boxes with words (but it didn’t know abbreviations nor phrases, so it was quite limited). The program did not help with clues but was helpful when it came to making sure the puzzle was balanced (a proper crossword puzzle will always have a mirrored number of black squares).
My favorite puzzles are the “World’s Most Ornery” from *Games Magazine. *They come with two sets of clues, difficult or easy, depending on how you fold the page. So if, like me, you’re working from the difficult clues, the easy ones are hidden.