TinyCrossword

Tiny Crossword is a daily game played publicly on Twitter. The bot posts a procedurally-generated three-word puzzle at noon PST. Players (any Twitter user) can @-reply with their proposed answer. After two hours, the bot posts the solution & credits the first player to have solved it. Twitter's constraints were designed for succinct handwritten messages, but bots explore what else can be expressed within those limits. The goal of this bot was to make a game that could fit into a tweet (117 characters with an image). Crediting the winner publicly also fits Twitter's form, where @-mentions can be a sign of admiration & prestige. Most bots generate content by taking a random walk through a large corpus. For Tiny Crossword, the corpus is Simple English Wikipedia; its brevity & plain language afford short puzzle clues. New puzzles are generated using up-to-date terms & concepts with no additional designer input.