Музыка, фильмы, игры

Some purists think that using electronic aids to solve clues is cheating, just as some think that the real challenge is to climb Everest without oxygen. But I fail to see the difference between checking in a dictionary or searching in an encyclopedia and doing it online.

Looking up half-remembered or totally forgotten references or making entirely new discoveries is one of the main pleasures of crosswords, and Googling is now a part of life. Google is particularly useful for non-Brits and expats who want a way into the culture-specific references in cryptic clues. How else, for example, would you so easily discover all the actors who have played Doctor Who, or the names of British cheeses?

There are now several good crossword programs. Their main attraction is to setters rather than to solvers. They save setters time by filling whole grids or the remaining parts of them at the press of a key and by offering up anagrams. But solvers, obviously, can use the same facilities in reverse. If you have a clue you can't crack, but find yourself looking at B _ R _ _ _ _ L and a program tells you that only three possible answers are available (BARONIAL, BAR STOOL and BIRD CALL), the clue will suddenly become clear.

The market leader in this field is Antony Lewis's Crossword Compiler. He is a cosmologist who wrote his first version in 1993 to teach himself computer programming, when he was doing his A levels, and had just returned to Cambridge from Toronto. His latest version is an all singing, all dancing program that will supply you with grids of many different types and fill them for you, or allow you to design your own one right up to a 50x50 "jumbo". You can export the finished version in any of the formats required by publishers, including an interactive version for your personal web page. (It will even allow you to make your own sudoku puzzles, but we need not dwell on this here.)

Fourteen language lists lie behind the program, including 77,000 words of Latin and 41,000 of Icelandic; you also get 37,000 UK and 16,000 US place names and as many again from the rest of the world. This cornucopia can be found at www.crossword-compiler.com , where you will find a free demo. The whole thing is yours for £95 and there is a linked English thesaurus and dictionary for a further £35 at wordweb.info. Alternatively, for nothing, you can download many helpful crossword tools from Derek Harrison's www.crossword.co.uk , from www.wordfun.ca and from www.bryson.ltd.uk .

· Hugh Stephenson's book, Secrets of the Setters: How to Solve the Guardian Crossword, is published by Guardian Books

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