Unlike most crosswords, there are no blanks in the grid. Each hint clues two distinct words. My friends who helped playtest this are asked to not post the solution or bet. Market resolves YES when someone posts the correct solution in the comments, or NO if no one has done that by market close.
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@Shelvacu My thoughts are that clues 4 and 5 are ungrammatical. A clue should not indicate a plural when the answer is not a plural, and vice versa.
@asmith I struggled with 4 for a while, this was the best I could think of. Should I just add "(different plurality)" or something at the end?
I never thought about 5… Isn't it grammatical because "bath salts" is uncountable? Not sure
@Shelvacu Bath salts is fine. I don't know how dress fits as an answer though?
You could make the clue for 4 more abstract/cryptic, like "4: keep starting over"
Then it doesn't imply a grammar. Makes the clue a bit easier though but maybe that's okay; it's a difficult puzzle.
@Odoacre Now we're talking! Except you would never say "dress are used by Victorian ladies", nor even "dress is used by victorian ladies". But good thinking.
@Mqrius "gender euphoria" is something sometimes experienced by trans women when they put on women's clothing, like a dress. It's a stretch, like everything lol
@Shelvacu I'm pretty sure that the phrase gender euphoria crossed my mind at some point while trying to solve that clue, so it wasn't that much of a stretch.
@Mqrius A mix of reading the community progress using bing (GPT-4) and old fashion puzzle solving. With the clues bing figured out bored, upper/opera, reset/tries. Then I fitted april, butts, salts/dress, at the end I had a word I didn't know "terse" but it was a word that existed and its description matched the clue.
alright i wrote a more heavily optimized solver, but without more guesses it's still not finding a good solution quickly. with no guesses it can churn out solutions like nobody's business, but they usually do not fit the clues. https://gist.github.com/brubsby/c92a3b530da5d5620fdc4e03822219d4
and here's the dictionary i've been using, i started limiting the words that came out of it to see if that helped, but no dice https://gist.github.com/brubsby/596e7a5ce57c14a4d9f7912c816bcc21
more guesses for positions would be most helpful from the crowd, and i might need to refactor for it to first attempt to exhaust all combinations of guesses first, before moving on to trying random words that fit. currently it starts on the row/col with the least amount of guesses, and finishes dfs-ing through all of the words there (including all words that aren't guesses), and then tries to fill in the rest of the puzzle dfs style (prioritizing guesses first). so it can get stuck in no guess land pretty quick. although if we had all of the words used in the guess list, it would find the combo pretty quick.
@brubsby So uh, I've done this before https://github.com/shelvacu/fwrf
I can finally say that tries are like linked lists; good in theory, terrible in practice on modern CPUs. Just use a hashmap. Unfortunately I think "reset" was guessed but not included in your list of guesses. And I tried to say it without saying it outright, but nvmbr and dcmbr were not possible because they aren't words in the wordlist I used.
wrote a program to try to brute force this from word lists, but not getting too many promising results, if anybody has a better word list you can try to plug it in, i think mine was from a wiktionary dump https://gist.github.com/brubsby/258107611dae337ef57145097584b1b3
https://gist.github.com/brubsby/acd4cbe0165596ef2329e635aca142a3 the candidate solutions, not great. i'll try not hardcoding the months maybe tomorrow
@Joshua hard to define what a "real" word is, so some overshoot is probably best when choosing a dictionary
@Joshua As brubsby said hard to define "real", but I am virtually certain that all of you will recognize all of the words and know what they mean.
https://gist.github.com/brubsby/a9105a393a6aea18ade068d7e1998129
version with less hardcoding, probably should put the months first though, running now but it's slow
Edit: nvmd