Nice, although I'd hardly call this a complex challenge to solve with a bit of code! The only really challenging part of this was what you briefly touched on towards the end:
> If I were more clever, I would have updated the script to not include words that fit certain criteria, or I would have done something more absurd like using natural language processing to see if the word pertains to writing. (that sounds possible, right?) Rather, I went through the 501 words manually and picked out the 49 that seemed arguably relevant to writing
In other words, you've solved the simple case perfectly well, but your solution is not yet scalable: How would you deal with a 100x100 grid? You'd probably need to optimise your search code (e.g. abandon looking for stupidly long words, or better yet once there are no possible longer words in the dictionary), and you'd definitely need to do some sort of dictionary definition search to help decide which answers are correct!
This almost looks like the sort of question Google would ask job applicants to answer, but they'd almost certainly extend the challenge to something like this 100x100 scenario!
> If I were more clever, I would have updated the script to not include words that fit certain criteria, or I would have done something more absurd like using natural language processing to see if the word pertains to writing. (that sounds possible, right?) Rather, I went through the 501 words manually and picked out the 49 that seemed arguably relevant to writing
In other words, you've solved the simple case perfectly well, but your solution is not yet scalable: How would you deal with a 100x100 grid? You'd probably need to optimise your search code (e.g. abandon looking for stupidly long words, or better yet once there are no possible longer words in the dictionary), and you'd definitely need to do some sort of dictionary definition search to help decide which answers are correct!
This almost looks like the sort of question Google would ask job applicants to answer, but they'd almost certainly extend the challenge to something like this 100x100 scenario!