This sounds like someone had a lot of fun with their Masters project :-)
QuoteWebcrawling program completes crossword puzzles
09 July 2005
From New Scientist Print Edition.
Called WebCrow, the program rephrases clues to make them Google-friendly, runs a search and then mines the results pages for possible solutions. It is slightly better at solving crosswords than an average undergraduate, filling in 80 per cent of all complete words and 90 per cent of all letters correctly within 15 minutes, say its creators at the University of Siena in Italy.
But it struggles with puns and general clues such as "a small bird". WebCrow will be unveiled at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence conference on 9 July.
now we need to implement it into a progrm so my father (and avid cross word puzzle junkie) can compete against each other.
Here's the website for the project: Webcrow (http://webcrow.dii.unisi.it/webpage/index.html)
There's a nice flash explaining the program -- Wow! what a simple idea. Leaves the door open to a lot of interesting extensions.