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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."
It's not that the puzzles are individually that difficult, but that there are so many of them. Several of the puzzles (a word search with some letters missing, for example, or some of the "matching pictures") can be brute forced in time. The catch is, there really isn't that much time...the winner averaged a puzzle solved every 6 minutes 49 seconds!
I could solve some of the easiest puzzles in that time, but the more difficult puzzles would take me (and most other solvers) MUCH longer than 7 minutes to figure out.
Think of it this way: people have a certain number of brain cells that they can dedicate to learning any particular set of fields of knowledge. Call this an "Intelligence Quotient". A reasonably smart person can become an expert on one particular subject if they dedicate their entire "Intelligence Quotient" to that subject. But this leaves them unable to carry on simple conversations on other topics. An extremely smart person would be able to do both: become an expert on one (or more) subject(s), and have a well-rounded intellect, and even be able to reason about things that they may have limited knowledge of.
In short, knowledge of UNIX != intelligence.