Before and After clues in Jeopardy! are clues pointing to
two answers in which the last part of one answer is also the first part of the
second answer. For example, "Supernatural kids' cartoon meets Star Wars
prequel" could be a clue to both "Danny Phantom" and "The
Phantom Menace", which would be shortened to "Danny Phantom
Menace".
These are a weak spot for me in Jeopardy, so I tried to make
some more crosswords using only the 'before and after' clues on from Jeopardy!
as found in the J-archive. It worked, sort of.
More specifically, it worked fine, but it took a lot of supervision, there were only about 550 crossword-viable clues and answers in 15 years of shows, and the results are a bunch of trivia-based on crossword clues that are either impossible or, well, trivial depending on the solver's knowledge.
My original hope was that, among the 200,000+ clues that I
had from an old J-archive scrape, that there would be a couple of thousand
clues that could be cleaned and slotted into crosswords automatically in order
to help me practice for the next online test in spring. Instead, there were
about 900 clues that had bother "before" and "after" in
their category name.
library(jsonlite)
library(stringr)
raw =
fromJSON("Jarchive2014.json")
> dim(raw)
[1] 216930 7
> before =
str_detect(raw$category,"BEFORE")
> after =
str_detect(raw$category,"AFTER")
>
table(before,after)
after
before FALSE
TRUE
FALSE 215646 195
TRUE
215 874
Thankfully, before and after clues are always in text format
instead of being audio and visual clues, so they get through most of my usual
filters.
all$Viable = TRUE
## hyper-references
signal audio or video clues
all$Viable[str_detect(all$Clue,"A
HREF")] = FALSE
all$Viable[str_detect(all$Clue,"a
href")] = FALSE
## These are lists,
where a crossword clue won't make sense
all$Viable[str_detect(all$Clue,"<br
")] = FALSE
## Another
indication of a video clue
all$Viable[str_detect(all$Clue,"Clue
Crew")] = FALSE
## CrossWORD not
crossNUMBER
all$Viable[str_detect(all$Word,"[0-9]")]
= FALSE
From my experience watching, every 'before and after' clue
comes from a category that has both the words 'before' and 'after' in the
title. However, it's not a bijection; sometimes these words are used as
wordplay to introduce some other category like "BEFORE AN AFTER" for
answers like 'rafter' and 'crafter'. In one case, the category was "Before
and after", but the clues were about how a single thing had changed before
and after some event. Cases like these made up 15-20% of the clues and were
removed manually.
From the remainder, I extracted the common word between two
parts of the answer, which was usually a single word. This common word was to
be the crossword answer, and the remaining part of the Jeopardy! answer would
be the crossword clue. So "Danny Phantom Menace" would be clued as
"Danny _______ Menace" with the answer in the grid being PHANTOM. For
three-word Jeopardy! answers, this worked nearly all the time by taking the
middle of the three words.
For four-word answers, this usually (but not always)
worked by whichever middle word was capitalized and had at least three letters.
Under this four-word scheme, "Licence to ______ Bill" and "full
______ of Lords" became clues to "Kill" and "House"
respectively. Of these, each one was manually checked for edge cases like
"Gone with the (WIND)shield" and capitalization quirks like
"Catherine The (GREAT) Expectations" and "Round (TABLE) of
contents". Seeing as before and after is a weak spot of mine, I may have
missed a few.
There's even a few triple before and afters, like "Paradise
(LOST) (GENERATION) X", "Josephine (BAKER) (STREET) smarts", and
"Orlando (MAGIC) (MOUNTAIN) Dew", which I left in. What to do with
these is left as an exercise.
About 100 of the answers were five or more words long, at
which point it became very hard to find the common term to make crossword
clues. This include like "the simple (LIFE) goes on", "In the
Heat of the (NIGHT) Gallery", "Never Never (LAND) of the midnight
sun", and "Pol (POT) calling the kettle black". At this point, I
decided not to chase diminishing returns, especially because many of these
would be easy crossword clues if either side of the common word was given.
What remained is a database of clues that could be used to
help fill a crossword, but not nearly enough to build a decent one on their
own. As such, I gave up trying to make crosswords from these, and instead
decided to just share the database. I hope that it helps some future
constructor looking for fresh fill for puzzles they are already working on, especially
one working for Queer Qrosswords ( https://queerqrosswords.com/
), or The Inkubator ( https://inkubatorcrosswords.com/
).
Examples:
Smokey _______ Crusoe
|
Robinson
|
Pixie and _______ Chicks
|
Dixie
|
My Fair _______ Marmalade
|
Lady
|
Paul _______ Texas Ranger
|
Walker
|
Miss _______ the Beautiful
|
America
|
Electoral _______ of Cardinals
|
College
|
Victorias _______ Weapon
|
Secret
|
Westminster _______ Road
|
Abbey
|
Little _______ of Gibraltar
|
Rock
|
birth of _______ Williams
|
Venus
|
William Henry __________ Ford
|
Harrison
|
Jacques Louis _______ Hasselhoff
|
David
|
American _______ Yourself
|
Express
|
The Pelican_______ Encounter
|
Brief
|
Victor _______ Audiences
|
Mature
|
Roe v _______ Boggs
|
Wade
|
Veruca _______ Lake City
|
Salt
|
Proud ______ Baker Eddy
|
Mary
|
Don _______ Chi Minh
|
Ho
|
William _______ and Teller
|
Penn
|
Huey _______ John Silver
|
Long
|
Sharon _______ of Scone
|
Stone
|
Marvin v _______ Gaye
|
Marvin
|
Andre the _______ Squid
|
Giant
|
Spider _______ Friday
|
Man
|
Ponce de _______ Spinks
|
Leon
|
Yabba Dabba ______ wop
|
Doo
|
![]() |
Crosswords are a great way to pass the time in transit |
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