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Google-Sponsored 2004 US Puzzle Championship
kublai kahn writes "On the NPR Weekend
Edition Sunday puzzle segment this past weekend, Will Shortz mentioned
the 2004 US Puzzle Championship,
sponsored by Google. Registration
closes on Thursday 17 June, and the competition is conducted online on
Saturday 19 June. "The top two US contestants will be selected to
join the US Team at the World Puzzle Championship in Opatija,
Croatia. Prizes will be awards to the top US contestants." (This was
mentioned on Slashdot last
year as well.) I'll be away from my internet connection over the
weekend, but perhaps others from the Slashdot crowd can compete.
Check the practice
test to see if it's your cup of tea."
You'll be away from your internet connection?
Away...
uh...
I just don't get it.
<grrr>
The first puzzle would be how to avoid getting slashdotted.
Get the PDF file containing the instructions while the server has been slashdotted. Now that's a challenge!
For the real test, you should print and read the Preview Instructions well in advance of the actual test. The Preview Instructions may include special last-minute instructions that will not appear elsewhere.
...get...instructions...well...in...advance...but. ..must...get...last...minute...instructions...
Okay I'm out. My brain already hurts...
I was in the park the other day wondering why frisbees get bigger and bigger the closer they get - and then it hit me.
Gateway Timeout
The following error occurred:
A gateway timeout occurred. The server is unreachable. Retry the request. (GATEWAY_TIMEOUT)
Please contact the administrator.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
. . . but the practice test page is down (./'ed already?) so here's a copy courtesy of the wayback machine (the last link is an index to several versions of that practice page.)
Good luck all.
everything in moderation
.. how to keep your site up during a slashdotting.
I have no idea what sort of puzzles this is... mind games, logic puzzles, rubix style or the good old edge-less 10000 piece jigsaw of jellybeans.
I, for one, was always shit at the rubix cube.
And I suck at chess for that matter.
And my 3 year old sister whips my arse at snap.
About the only thing I do win in Scrabble against my girlfriend, but as she's not a native english speaker, I may have an unfair advantage.
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
And when I discovered they weren't talking about tetris, the white dove of hope came crashing back to earth in a fiery ball of feathers.
At least I get some roasted avian out of the deal...
#define CLUE 0
> this past weekend, Will Shortz mentioned
If you ever have the chance to hear Will Shortz speak in person, it is well worth it. If you have an interest in word puzzles, cross or otherwise, he is very interesting. Plus, he will usually play a game with the audience for a good amount of time.
The opinions expressed above are those off one side of my brain, the other side and my employer may not agree.
Do you actually think that there are 200,000 slashdotters that actually click links to RTFA? Let reduce that number down a bit.. say 5?
Hmmm.
Suppose you were elected to the finals. Do they pay any flight/room costs? (Due to the recent Slashdotting, I can't RTFA and answer my own question.)
"Yes, I have a Disaster Recovery Plan. It's called my Resume"
1. Battleships - 5 points; 5 point bonus
Locate the position of the 10-ship fleet in the grid. The fleet is shown to the right of the grid: one 4-unit battleship, two 3-unit cruisers, three 2-unit destroyers, and four 1-unit submarines. Each segment of a ship occupies a single cell. Ships are oriented either horizontally or vertically, and they do not touch each other, not even diagonally. The numbers on the right and bottom edges of the grid reveal the total number of ship segments that appear in each respective row or column. (For solving purposes, ignore the letters above and the numbers left of the grid.)
2. Pentomino Division - 5 points
Divide each of the six shapes into two pieces so that each of the 12 Pentominoes (shown at right) is used exactly once. The Pentominoes can be rotated and/or reflected. Answer: Enter the letters pairs corresponding to each of the six original shapes.
3. Dutch Segway - 5 points
Which of the numbered drawings is an exact mirror image of the drawing in the upper left?
4. Corral - 20 points; 5 point bonus
Draw a single closed loop along the grid lines so that all the numbered squares are inside the loop. Additionally, each number equals the count of interior squares that are directly in line (horizontally or vertically) with that number's square, including the square itself. In the example, the square containing the 4 is directly in line with two squares above it and one square to its right. Including the square itself, the total count is four.
5. Rotator Mosaic - 20 points
Divide the grid (along the grid lines) into exactly 10 symmetric pieces (each appearing unchanged if rotated 180, including its shape and the pattern of any white or black disks).
6. A to Z Crisscross - 25 points; 5 point bonus
Place the 19 words into the grid in crisscross style (words appear either across or down, and all words formed in the grid appear in the word list), so that there are exactly 26 word intersections--each in one of the highlighted squares. Additionally, each of the letters from A to Z appears exactly once in the highlighted squares.
Hmmm.
Figuring this out is part of the test, I guess you wont be going.
Help fight continental drift.
the fact that this is horribly disgusting doesn't bother me nearly as much as the fact that you sat down and imagined this..... do something productive with your life
I used to try doing this kind of thing, back when I thought that MENSA was a good organization to try to belong to.
Looking at the practice test, I realize that I don't really like word puzzles. It's that last criss cross puzzle that got me. There's no general solution to word puzzles; you just arbitrarily try answers till you get it. And the final solution doesn't have any beauty.
Take the rotator puzzle. This is an interesting puzzle, and the algorithm to find the final solution may be very interesting indeed, even applicable in video processing and the like...
But don't include NP complete problems in your puzzle. I don't like them. The algorithm and method of solving isn't interesting or insightful, it's just boring and tedious.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
Why did this site melt under slashdotting in five minutes? From Netcraft:
Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 14-Jun-2004 199.165.204.120 Micro Serve
Hopefully they solve that one before the real contest starts.
This practice puzzle is a typical example of what you might expect to see at the Championship. There are other types of puzzles in the test, so if you don't score well on this don't lose all hope!
.
The following might sound easy but it's harder than it sounds. The hardest puzzles are always the ones with the fewest rules!
PRACTICE PUZZLE
Join the dots with a line. There are only four rules:
1. Only straight lines are to be used (no curves, bends or corners)
2. These straight lines must start and end at a dot
3. You may only go through a dot one time
4. You may NOT intersect lines
5. You may NOT lift the pen from the paper during the process of solving the puzzle once you have laid it on the paper
Are you ready?
Here's the puzzle:
.
(NOTE: If you run out of ink once you start the puzzle you will be disqualified)
(NOTE 2: this is a 2-dimensional puzzle. Any attempts to solve this puzzle in three-dimensional space will result in disqualification.)
Scoring:
less than 3 minutes - Incredible! We recommend you take part in the competition. May we commend your parent's rearing skills!
3-6 minutes - Pretty good. If your skills in other types of puzzles are at this level or higher, we recommend signing up! You might have been deficient in some nutrients as a child.
6-12 minutes - Decent. If this type of puzzle is not your forté and you are better at others you might still have a chance.
12-20 minutes - Poor. Sorry, but your dot-connecting skills are not up to par with our competition. This is probably because you were dropped on your head as a baby.
Over 20 minutes - Abysmal. Your parents must have a postgraduate degree in any social sciences subject. Thus is life.
"We have an A-Bomb...what more do you want, mermaids?" --I.I. Rabi, speaking in defense of Robert Oppenheimer
LOL. Bring it, Eh? 1812. Look it up. 3 failed attempts to invade Canada, and 1 burned down White House. Pfft.
Uhh, so they put up a pdf... and it's password protected... and you can only see the preview... until they give you the password (released on their site at test time)... which lets you take the whole test?
Am I missing or does this seem ridiculously insecure?
I'd love to download it and play with it... but, uhh, you know, slashdot effect and all...
They had a puzzle similar to the mirror image one, except it asked which was exactly the same. You could easily identify mismatches by placing the images side-by-side and "Magic Eye"'ing them, as you would for a stereogram. Images that are exactly the same will be fine, but images that differ even slightly will have blurry smudges when observed this way. It's like a quick 2-D diff. I told them this was a flaw and I'm glad to see them change the puzzle.
blarg.
Google + Boggle =
Boogle! Fun for the entire family! Do a hidden word search on each Google query!
Bryan R.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, or $12.50 as seen on eBay.....
The password is world.
Six score characters.
Brevity being wit's soul
I have enough space.
Cigani! Juris!
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
...it's Puzzlemaster Will Shortz. Please show proper respect, or we will send a (24-Down) to (10-Across) out your porch light.
This just in: the admins of wpc.puzzles.com are fans of the song "Tub Thumper." Whether or not they like other Chumbawumba sonds has yet to be heard.
"I get knocked down, but I get up again! You're never going to keep me down!"
I wonder if the US's best puzzler, Wei-Hwa Huang, will compete in the online tournament. He won the world championships a couple of years ago and finished second last year. I went to college with this guys and he was a dweeb even by Techer standards. All freshmen go to an orientation camp on Catalina Island and every year's there's a "talent show." Wei-Hwa entered the talent show and showed how he could solve a Rubik's Cube after only glancing at it once. He would quickly look at the cube, then walk around the room trying to be funny while he solved it without looking at it again. Each joke was followed by what can only be described as a very uncomfortable silence... I think Wei-Hwa works for Google now, an interesting coincidence?
tell the world what is the code for Google's search engine functionality. :)
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
Solution: ._.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Join the dots with a line. There are only four rules:
1. Only straight lines are to be used (no curves, bends or corners)
2. These straight lines must start and end at a dot
3. You may only go through a dot one time
4. You may NOT intersect lines
5. You may NOT lift the pen from the paper during the process of solving the puzzle once you have laid it on the paper
Are you ready?
"I see five rules"
"I'm sorry, but there are actually only four rules"
[ZOT!]
"AAAGGGGHHHHHHHH!!!!!"
char *mySig;
and who modded this up?
1.Chess
2.Checkers
Think again, Sherlock.
It's in the middle of f'n nowhere and you want me to go there to solve puzzles? What am I supposed to do for fun, cross the border and pick me up some romanian women???......
sign me up...
Wheel of Time: Book by Book and Sumview (summary review) Bigdady92 style: http://bigdady92.blogspot.com/
Starting Score: 1 point
Karma-Bonus Modifier +1 (Edit)
Total Score: 2
Umm... Nobody.
Oh, you have to love the opt-in selection on the registration page:
Click here if you would like to be contacted by Google regarding employment opportunities and other promotions.
Pay me $100k to work for them or spam me to decrease my mortgage payment while I increase my penis size; it's all the same, right? Why, Google, why?
have you seen the groupies!!! oh wait, nevermind, there are none.
in a minute and a half, how many posts will be made to point this out?
"Prizes will be awards to the top US contestants."
That must be the cheapest way to find out who are the best puzzle players in the world.
Luckly, my flag doesn't have red stripes.
Go
Ok, I tried my hand at the puzzles last year. Finished somewhere in the top 50, not bad.
HOWEVER, the entire thing was spoiled by a terrible server. They tell you to go to a site at precisely 11:00 am to get a password for a PDF, but guess what, the server isn't responding. I refresh and refresh until I give up and call the toll help line. They just say "gee, we're having some issues."
15 minutes later I get the page to load. That's 15 minutes less that I had to work on the test. I rationalized it, thinking, "hey, everyone else was having the same problem so they're just as screwed as I am."
So then I chug through the puzzles (definitely entertaining.) I look at my timer and see I have 15 minutes left to go. Remembering what happened at the start of the test, I decide to submit my answers early. I figure that with 15 minutes, I could either:
1. use those 15 minutes to try to milk about 20 more points out of the test (there were a few problems I was "close" to solving)
2. submit early and avoid a server fiasco, figuring that anyone trying to submit "on time" would actually be late up to 15 minutes. Since there's a 5 pt. per minute late penalty, I might lose up to 75 points if I don't submit early.
So I submit early and sure enough, their site is hammered 15 minutes later, for a good half-hour. Boy am I glad that I was so insightful.
But wait! A surprise day-after announcement! "Since we were having server problems, we allowed everyone an extra 15 minutes! So everyone that submitted up to 15 minutes late doesn't get penalized!!"
OMGWTFBBQ?!?H?#!?!? I don't care how trashed your server is, you DO. NOT. CHANGE. THE. RULES. OF. A. COMPETITION. AFTER. IT. IS. OVER.
I emailed the "judges" about it, basically saying "what's the meaning of changing the rules after the contest is over? if I had known, I wouldn't have submitted early to avoid the expected server problems."
Their reply? "well yeah, but it doesn't matter much anyway."
In a sense it didn't, seeing as how the top 2 (US team appointees) blew out the competition. However, they did say they were giving prizes to the top 25. If that's the case, then assuming an extra half-hour could net someone roughly 20 points, that's enough to go from top 40 to top 20 (I think. I'd check the site where they have the results (http://wpc.puzzles.com/uspc03/results-top.htm) but it's !@*&^$*&^#!*& SLASHDOTTED.)
In short, fun idea, ridiculously stupid implementation. I can't believe Google has their name on this one.
Solution to 1
Solution to 2
Solution to 3
Solution to 4
Solution to 5
Solution to 6 - any takers?
On Linux, of course... I do not know about MS windows
Even, www.puzzle.com does not show correctly on my box. It is created with MS Frontpage 5.0...
Oh well, I will not practice today
You slashdotted Google!