The Vint.ee portal opened a crossword puzzle solving environment

Hello, Almost two years ago we had the idea that we could solve crosswords in Vint. More than a year ago we also received a mandate from our users to develop it. Since solving crosswords requires a very good memory and also quick thinking, which fits the concept of the portal, we decided to try it. How are crosswords created? Until now, crosswords have been created by crossword creators. Since their time costs money and we wanted an essentially infinite number of different crosswords (to use in daily crosswords, duels, tournaments), we had to do something that had never been done before: generate a random crossword with a given difficulty level in real time (faster than a second). We struggled with the algorithm for a few months, but where can we get the questions/answers? We called on our users for help! While 4,000 questions/answers were entered in the first 24 hours, by today 26,000 have been entered. However, the journey from quantity to quality was not easy. There was a lot of inventing what the difficulty levels of the questions and the sizes of the crosswords should be. It basically took us a year to figure out how to define the difficulty levels and question categories and then to align all the entered questions with these definitions. Today it has been done: We have 3 crosswords of different sizes: 8x8, 10x10 and 13x13 and three levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard. The easy ones should be within the reach of every elementary school graduate, the medium ones should be solved by a broad-minded person, and the hard ones are for specialists in their field :) If we solved the first crossword on 13.05.2016, then in more than a year we have already solved 46000 crosswords. Every day, 9 daily crosswords can be solved on our portal. Today, about 100 daily crosswords are solved by 20 users, but we hope that this number will increase in the future. All users also have a crossword puzzle rating. There are two ways to get a rating: either by inviting another user to a duel or by participating in crossword puzzle solving tournaments. In tournaments, 5 crossword puzzles must be solved, and the tournaments also have three levels of difficulty: easy, medium, hard. Currently, vint.ee organizes an easy tournament every day at 22:00 and a medium tournament at 13:00. In addition, all VIP users can organize tournaments at a time of their own choosing. Although our crossword puzzle environment is officially open as of today, the work is not done for us yet: similar to sudoku statistics, we are also creating different views of crossword puzzles - the best solving times, the most active solvers, etc. In addition, we want to improve the question submission process - for each quality question, we are willing to give the user one credit, but to achieve this, we need to improve the process and tools for reviewing submitted questions. In any case - fast thinking and exciting crosswords! Best, Vint.ee Team