- Joined
- Aug 4, 2004
- Messages
- 373
And I don't mean the simple ones, like crosswords or jigsaw puzzles, I'm talking about multi-part, headache-inducing, ridiculously hard ones that are most incredibly satisfying to solve.
This weekend I got to participate in the 2005 Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. It was incredibly fun. We had teams of 4 people, competing for 12 hours to solve 20 puzzles, and one "meta-puzzle", which requires many of the solutions to the other puzzles in order to solve.
12 hours sounds like a long time, but it's not. Time goes by pretty fast, and at the end, I was wishing it was longer. (We needed another 30 minutes to solve that damn meta-puzzle!) Some other, more famous, puzzle challenges are even longer, taking multiple days, possibly without sleep, to complete.
My team was formed of people that I knew from the ICPC programming team. We were all first-timers in the puzzle-solving buisness, so when I went in, I wasn't expecting to do very well. Actually, I was expecting that we would get, as a computer geek might put it, pwn3d.
Halfway through the competition, we checked the standings and realized that we were in first at the University of Michigan, and 2nd overall, behind a team from (of course) MIT.
With a couple hours left to go, we decided to stop solving the other puzzles, and work on the meta-puzzle. The first team that solves the meta wins the grand prize, which was an Xbox360. The second team wins the first prize, and so on. Teams which don't solve the meta are ranked in order of points accumulated (by solving the other puzzles).
So it was somewhat of a strategic decision, taking a chance by stopping progress on the other puzzles to try to win it all. At that point, we were still in first at the University of Michigan.
Well, we got close. There are something like 30 steps in solving the meta puzzle, and we got through about the first 20, before hitting a mental block. At the end, all the Microsoft staff stood around watching us. I think they wanted us to win, since we were first-timers, and since we weren't from MIT.
By the end, the other teams had caught up with us and finished ahead. We took 3rd place at the University of Michigan and 9th place overall. There were something like 170 teams from 8 schools, so that wasn't bad at all.
And in the end, it isn't so much about what place you finish in, but the fun you have. (Although, winning that Xbox 360 would have been nice.) And this was definitely a great deal of fun. All I have to say about next year: Watch out, MIT.
If you're interested in seeing puzzles like the ones we had to solve, go to this website: http://www.collegepuzzlechallenge.com/2004/Puzzles/index.html. They don't have the puzzles from this year's competition up, but they were similar in style to these.
This weekend I got to participate in the 2005 Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. It was incredibly fun. We had teams of 4 people, competing for 12 hours to solve 20 puzzles, and one "meta-puzzle", which requires many of the solutions to the other puzzles in order to solve.
12 hours sounds like a long time, but it's not. Time goes by pretty fast, and at the end, I was wishing it was longer. (We needed another 30 minutes to solve that damn meta-puzzle!) Some other, more famous, puzzle challenges are even longer, taking multiple days, possibly without sleep, to complete.
My team was formed of people that I knew from the ICPC programming team. We were all first-timers in the puzzle-solving buisness, so when I went in, I wasn't expecting to do very well. Actually, I was expecting that we would get, as a computer geek might put it, pwn3d.
Halfway through the competition, we checked the standings and realized that we were in first at the University of Michigan, and 2nd overall, behind a team from (of course) MIT.
With a couple hours left to go, we decided to stop solving the other puzzles, and work on the meta-puzzle. The first team that solves the meta wins the grand prize, which was an Xbox360. The second team wins the first prize, and so on. Teams which don't solve the meta are ranked in order of points accumulated (by solving the other puzzles).
So it was somewhat of a strategic decision, taking a chance by stopping progress on the other puzzles to try to win it all. At that point, we were still in first at the University of Michigan.
Well, we got close. There are something like 30 steps in solving the meta puzzle, and we got through about the first 20, before hitting a mental block. At the end, all the Microsoft staff stood around watching us. I think they wanted us to win, since we were first-timers, and since we weren't from MIT.
By the end, the other teams had caught up with us and finished ahead. We took 3rd place at the University of Michigan and 9th place overall. There were something like 170 teams from 8 schools, so that wasn't bad at all.
And in the end, it isn't so much about what place you finish in, but the fun you have. (Although, winning that Xbox 360 would have been nice.) And this was definitely a great deal of fun. All I have to say about next year: Watch out, MIT.
If you're interested in seeing puzzles like the ones we had to solve, go to this website: http://www.collegepuzzlechallenge.com/2004/Puzzles/index.html. They don't have the puzzles from this year's competition up, but they were similar in style to these.
