Fast Heuristic Detection of Offensive Words in Wordwheel Puzzles

Abstract Offensive words appear in Wordwheel-type puzzles with a high frequency. Previous approaches to eliminating these words have focused largely on eliminating puzzles that might give rise to an offensive word. This work presents a fast, heuristic approach to detecting an offensive word within a puzzle. After a preprocessing stage, the detection occurs with a single bitwise operation on a 64-bit word. Tests show that as long as there are at least 3 taboo words possible in a puzzle, the heuristic approach is faster than a depth-first search of the puzzle. In addition to being fast, the approach is guaranteed to detect all offensive words, and has a low false positive rate.