... Binkley¹

supported in part by National Science Foundation grant CCR-9411861

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... considered²

Two improvements can be made. First, the width and height can be bound by less then $length$. Consider, for example a maximum width solution. Here half of the words must be oriented UP-and-DOWN. Even if the UP-and-DOWN words are taken from the shortest half of the input words the width is still less than $length$.

Second, a more complex solution considers only a linear portion of the grid. Initialization occurs when and where words are placed. The cells for the letters of the word and the cells adjacent to a word are initialized to blank to facilitate checking that the solution is correctly connected.

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