Introduction

Daily NYT mini crosswords are small but mighty. This solver treats them as a constrained search problem augmented by language models for clue understanding.

Pipeline

• Scraper – Selenium orchestrates authentication and captures puzzle state in under 400 ms.
• Clue Resolver – Hybrid ranking using BM25 over archived clues combined with GPT-4o-mini completions.
• Board Filler – Applies forward checking and arc consistency to avoid dead-end branches.

ACROSS
1. Friendly path?  = BEST FRIEND ROUTE
4. ___-bo         = POGO

Observations

1. GPT guidance is most valuable for theme clues; filler words still shine with classic wordlists.
2. Constraint propagation removed 63% of recursive calls compared with naive depth-first search.
3. The solver now posts completions in Discord within ~8 seconds of puzzle release.

Future Work

• Expand to the full-size daily by parallelising the constraint solver.
• Integrate a feedback loop from failed runs to improve the prompt library.