Homework #3
Proposed abstract

Crossword puzzles are a familiar feature of newspapers.  Although the clues
are designed to be tricky and obscure, people of all ages are able to
solve them.  While artificial intelligence approaches have easily been
designed for chess and other games, the solution of a crossword puzzle
presents a sharply greater difficulty.  In this paper, we present what 
we believe to be the first general program to solve crossword puzzles.
Our program relies on algorithms and insights from numerous areas of
computer science, on access to a variety of online databases, and
on a method for selecting the best candidate solutions to each
individual clue.  The program, when tested on a range of published
puzzles, was generally able to solve 95% of the clues correctly.