Welcome to the first Wordplay column! I didn’t think I’d do this but Wordplay is like the third thing on the NYTimes Games page so I felt like I had to make my own rip-off.
Spoilers for the aforementioned mini ‘Between Shades!!!’
I thought I’d use this to basically explain how I find Schrödinger’s crossword-applicable words.
With the help of Adam Aaronson’s Wordlisted web tool it’s a lot easier to find a pairs of words that can have a letter swapped out.
First you have to select “Regex replacement”
So let’s say I decided I wanted GREY/GRAY to be closer to the middle of the puzzle, meaning that the crossing answer’s E/A replacement would be in, say, the third letter, I’d find it like this.
This looks quite confusing at first but it’s rather simple, mostly because this is the only thing I am capable of doing with the regex nonsense. This took me like a solid day to figure out don’t worry. I am going to be using insanely wrong terminology so forgive me regexheads.
So for the first text box:
The ^ and $ are merely to note the start and end. The parenthesis are basically defining the sections that the next text box will refer back to later, the periods inside them are serving as wildcard single characters, and the E is, well, the E.
So basically that first text box is just there to find every word that goes xxExx (blEnd, crEam, etc).
The second text box:
The $1 and $2 are essentially calling for each (..) section from the previous text box and sandwiching the A with them. So it takes, say the (bl) and (nd) of blEnd, then remixes it back to make blAnd. It does this hundreds of times and checks the outputs against the dictionary to see what are actually words or not until it comes out with a list like this.
I realize now that I am really bad at explaining concepts. If this didn’t explain it I am so sorry but I cannot help you anymore.
I also did this one time with a much more complicated three-word Schrödinger and I had to pull out an Excel sheet it was crazy.