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Multidimensional Crosswords?
Aaron asks: "I write the crossword for the student newspaper at my university (McGill, in Montreal). For the last issue of the year I like to go all-out and do something special. Usually I just make a super-big one, but I had a brainstorm - a crossword is essentially a 2-dimensional matrix where set intersections are judged as valid if they test positive as real words out of a dictionary. Of course, the decision to limit the matrix to 2 dimensions is just pragmatic so if you wanted you could make crosswords of 3 or more dimensions (though a 4-dimension crossword might have to be done in pencil first). Any ideas on how to actually do this?" This would be interesting on a computer, but would be fairly hard to do in print. If you were of a mind to make a 3D crossword puzzle on paper, how would you do it?
I'm a journalism student with some layout experience, so I'm fairly sure I know what I'm talking about here.
It's a neat concept, but kind of silly when you think about it. Print is, by nature, a two-dimensional medium. I've seen two solutions already mentioned here, making the crossword much smaller or spreading it across multiple pages.
The way I envision it, a three-dimensional crossword would have to be shrunk down a lot to be able to fit in the usual space a 2d crossword occupies, which just makes it inefficient. Besides, a 3d crossword isn't going to be much different from a 2d crossword after being flattened for print.
If you were to try and span it out over several pages, you would probably piss your editors off, who likely don't want what is usually a small diversion occupying precious ad space.
vi ~/.emacs
implementation on paper depends on the rules of the game
do you require only simple linear three-d words (e.g. just words on x & y, OR y & z, OR x & z) or are words that function in all three dimensions permitted (i.e. diagonal through the cube)?
if you DISALLOW diagonals, then you could do it (simply) with five (or whatever) crossword grids on a single page, and color code the various dimensions (like 6 down green, 8 across red, etc...)
the obvious difficulty would be that the instructions on how to work it would take up far too much space on the page!
perhaps the short answer is the sad one: since paper is a 2d medium, a 3d crossword puzzle ON PAPER is far more difficult than one would hope, once you take into account the end user
however, there's no reasons you couldn't do it in a medium that alows 3-d modeling, and rotation, and all that good stuff we've come to expect from our little glowing boxes... a web implementation would certainly be fun, and would require FAR less instruction, becuase the 3D nature of the thing would be clearly modeled in the display
it would certainly be fun to see how those solid black boxes work out in the 3d version