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2004 U.S. Puzzle Championship Winners
Fortran IV writes "The winner of the 2004 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship has been announced. Roger Barkan, last year's runner-up, scored 367 of a possible 432 points by solving 22 of 25 puzzles in just 2-1/2 hours. (It would take me an hour just to copy down all the answers.) This was previously mentioned here. The complete test is still available for the fun of it."
Dear God, It would take me a week just to figure out which side was up
That we slashdotted a major affiliation of google.
Way to go Rog! ...and no he doesn't run Linux :)
Damn puzzle nerd
I wonder if Google takes some of the higher placed winners and offer them jobs? These contestants are probably the brainiacs Google would like to employ.
--
11 Gmail invitations availiable
Wait a minute... did we just slashdot Google?
I want to know what kind of enegrgy drink he had becuz theres no way i culd stay awake for 20+ hours doing nothing but puzzles. I culdnt even stay awake that long to play video games.
/.'ed already!!!
http://jayceecorder.blogspot.com
...a Google cache of a Google site that got slashdotted: Click Here
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
I am trying to get the actual challenge file, but for the moment I have the 180k instructions pdf mirrored here:
http://www.css-auth.com/google/
If/When I get the challenge file I will put it up there.
Ads? What ads?
Warning! can be very addictive, especially since the pieces make a most satisfying click noise when you snap them together. The site logs your completion times for the puzzles and the various types of pieces, so this can help everyone practice for next years contest.
~*~ ~*~ ~*~
yes, girls read /. too...
Slashdotting Google! Is there nothing sacred left? How about slashdotting Slashdot?
I heard on NPR that the winner was a 'mathematician from Laurel Maryland'. I wonder who he works for??
Roger Barkan's only missed questions were due to being distracted by dropped toothpicks.
Since I was a child, I could always solve these puzzles within seconds.
How? I cross my eyes so that the two images form an overlapped image to my perception. So I see three images, but concentrate on the "middle" image. This takes some concentration to retain focus and alignment, to begin with, but it does not take long to master doing it quickly.
All the differences appear to flash and really jump out in an instant. That's about the best I could describe the effect. The hard part is trying to circle the differences with a pen whilst holding this state, because the pen comes into just one eyes view and causes loss of alignment.
Anyone else do this?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Works like a charm.
That's right. All your base.
I'm sorry, I forgot to add this. Nothing says "Hey Ladies", quite like "I've actually competed in a programming competition..."
So your saying if I were drunk and had crossed vision, I could easily solve the puzzles faster than any sober man. Maybe thats how he finished these puzzles in 2 1/2 hours, the answeres just jumped out.
Only spotted 5 differences so far.
"COAT AIR"
The sun ray
The river
The bridge
The bush above house
Hey, that's my password you are typing
I was roommates with Roger at summer camp way back in the day. His girlfriend would write him encoded letters and he'd figure out how to break the code. Silly me, I thought it was a waste of time....
"TV is great! Every New Year's I make a resolution to watch more TV." - Ann Coulter
Figuring out how to get to it while its slashdotted!
(\_/)
(O.o) This is Bunny. Add Bunny to your signature
(> <) to help him achieve world domination.
Cows pocket in 5.
The bridge? They all look the same to me.
The bush above the house? Again, all look the same to me.
By river, you mean the extra riple around the bridge in 2?
The diffs I see are:
1. COAT AIR
2. Extra ripple around bridge.
3. Extra sun ray.
4. No difference here.
5. Cows right pocket (on our left) has moved.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
The complete test is still available for the fun of it.
Not after we got to it!
Not a Twitter sockpuppet... but I wish I was.
The bush above the house? Again, all look the same to me.
Hmm.. about the bridge and the bush above the house. There are minor nitpicking differences, which might just be drawing defects.
For the bush above the house, the highest bush is shaded in different tone (darker vs lighter) on the left outline.
For the bridge, the "dots" on the bridge are not exactly the same. For example, in pic 3 and 5, the dot on the bridge along the highest row to the right side, differ from the rest.
Hey, that's my password you are typing
27: At the current rate that the RIAA is suing file sharers, and given the world birthrate and spread of broadband, how long before they sue you? Negative and imaginary answers not accepted.
28: The irresistable force (Slashdot users) and the immovable object (Google file servers) are about to clash. Predict the result to five decimal places.
(After all, we need questions with real world significance, don't we?)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
"It is a solemn thought: dead, the noblest man's meat is inferior to pork."
for a score of 82. Though I really got 8, but I misentered the answer for 2.3, so is cost me 11 poins (-5 plus not getting the 6 it was worth). I still had fun, though. The final rankings haven't been posted yet, so I don't know how well I did comparatively. I did score better than last year, though.
I just finished number 1 and submitted it with 8 seconds to spare.
I got 1, 2.1, 3, 6, 8, 10 and 12 right. I missed 2.3, 5, and 16.
I tried a few others (7, 9 especially) and realized I would not finish them in time.
It seems they were much better organized this year. Last year, the server melted right at the deadline, and I wasn't able to submit my final answers until about 5 minutes after the deadline. Also, this year we got email confirmation of our scores, which is really nice. I'm eager to see the final statistics.
Those people that scored best must practice these type of puzzles constantly and know the exact techniques to be able to solve them so quickly.
More power to them.
Hopelessly pedantic since 1963.
Well, it is password protected, and I thought xpdf would ignore that, but obviously not. That sucks, and is this what it is going to be when we get DRM?
I just love postscript more and more...
Evolution of Language Through The Ages: 6000 BC : ungh, grrf, booga 2000 AD : grep, awk, sed
yes - as a kid I too used the same trick (I'm some 50yrs older now but still works) - works well for stereo images though often I find my eyes need time to re-adjust - as a kid I used to look at regular patterns and 'move' the images of left and right eye to overlap on different components, I presume its a trick of moving the eyeball but retaining focus
I Google for PDF Password Recovery, crack the password then have plenty of time to get help working on this.
Now, only if I had know about the contest beforehand.
Exactly. It's called stereopsis and it is how those 'magic eye' puzzles work. Any differences will literally jump out at you.
n 3. htm
http://members.lycos.co.uk/brisray/optill/visio
For the instructions the password is endeavor.
For the test itself the password is xcode6fire.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
I checked all through Yahoo....
...when "Omni" magnizine used to publish "The World's Hardest IQ Test". The goal was to identify people who were in 180+ or triple sigma. Mensa ("table" in Latin) accepts the top 2% but Triple Sigma wants those who are in the top 1/10,000.
What's really interesting is when Omni was going under. An "official" announcement went out that they were preparing to be an online magazine, then several months past, and *poof*
It took me 3 tries to get past the password.....
Computing the factorial of a number is a good example of recursion but not in the way most people understand it so they'd fail a test if you asked them why it was recursion. In the terms of calling itself in simplified data.
For the bush above the house, the highest bush is shaded in different tone (darker vs lighter) on the left outline.
For the bridge, the "dots" on the bridge are not exactly the same. For example, in pic 3 and 5, the dot on the bridge along the highest row to the right side, differ from the rest.
Okay. I picked out lots of very small differences that seemed to be the cause of dither-dots that did not have the same grouping or alignment as each other.
Looking at the PDF, it seems that this is coming down to my laser printers dithering of the PDF's bitmaps, as the outlines, as-viewed, appear anti-aliased and thus have a deal of grey around the edges that needs to be dithered on a B&W printer.
Did you print them?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
These puzzles aren't that difficult. They just require some good reasoning and patience. If just for fun I can finish a good portion of the test sitting here scribbling a few things down on an envelope, I don't see how any real /.'er would have a problem.
These are like logic questions. Two and a half hours doesn't seem that hard to accomplish a really great score - I don't consider myself very proficient at math and/or the advanced logic and reasoning disciplines either. Whats with being intimidated? If its from Google its most likely fun and interesting and awesome. Of course its a challenge, but don't let it rattle you.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
Richard Feynmans sister used to do the same while he was at Los Alamos. Drove the censors nuts.
Read Surely you are Joking Mr Feynnman if you haven't already done so. Well worth it.
Help fight continental drift.
But I'm sure you don't mind paying for watching Fox News bullshit, am I right ?
"Google is not affiliated with the authors of this page nor responsible for its content"
Really?
YES! I did this too, starting in high school. I've never heard of anyone else doing this until now.
Even slight differences, like a missing period, or text which is shifted a millimeter to the left or right, pop right out. Writing with my eyes crossed doesn't bother me much.
One time I had my eyes crossed, staring intently at a stereo image, and someone twisted the paper around to see what I was looking at. Instant headache!
-- chris at staygood dot net
I talked about my doing this in an earlier thread. In the practice test, they changed to problem to identify differences in the mirror image--which would screw this method. Did they change it back for the real test? That's not too smart.
blarg.
Mirror image wouldn't solve it. The puzzle can be printed out (they even say it was designed for printing out).
So just print it out, cut the page up into the images, reverse the mirror image, overlay, and hold up to the light.
I guarantee it's quicker to do this way than looking slowly at each image in turn, and comparing it back and forth.