️ Joystick Jargon

I'm excited to share my latest project, Joystick Jargon - a unique crossword puzzle experience that blends the density of New York Times-style crosswords with the world of gaming.

As someone who's always enjoyed challenging myself with intricate crosswords, I wondered: what if I could create puzzles specifically tailored to a specifc topic? Turns out, crafting crosswords and placing words efficiently is quite the computational challenge!

What is Joystick Jargon?

Joystick Jargon is a web-based crossword puzzle game that combines traditional crossword elements with gaming-related vocabulary. It's designed to challenge both your linguistic skills and your gaming knowledge.

How it works:

• Using a 3.8 Million Rows Reddit dataset from Hugging Face

• Narrowing it down to gaming-related subreddits like r/gaming, r/dota2, r/leagueoflegends

• Using ML, particularly BERT-embeddings and simple cosine similarity, to find and extract 30,000 keywords from the subreddits

• Preprocessing the data to clean up keywords not suitable for crossword words

• Employing a heuristic crossword algorithm to create grids and place words

• Sending words and context to a Large Language Model to generate clues

Why it's special:

• A unique blend of traditional crosswords and gaming terminology

• Different grid sizes (5x5 6x4, 9x9, 15x15)

• Potential to automatically generate a large amount of puzzles with fresh content

The overengineered charm:

I'll be the first to admit, this project might be a tad overengineered for what it is. But hey, that's part of the fun, right? It's like using a gaming PC to play Minesweeper.

A word of caution:

Since we're dealing with Reddit data, there might be some colorful language in the mix. I didn't manually filter out any potentially offensive words, so consider this your PG-13 warning!

Who's it for?

If you enjoy both wordplay and gaming, Joystick Jargon is right up your alley. It's about a 50-50 mix of traditional crossword fare and gaming-specific terms.

Give Joystick Jargon a try and let me know what you think!

Also, I'm curious: what other topics do you think would make great themed crosswords? Share your ideas in the comments - maybe I'll create a whole series of niche puzzles for different communities!