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2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship
Fortran IV writes "Registration is open for the 2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, Saturday, June 18. Two winners will join Team USA at the 2005 World Puzzle Championship in Eger, Hungary (tourist info here if you read Hungarian). If you're the type who plays 12 simultaneous chess games in your head while debugging code and memorizing logarithm tables, you might have a chance of teaming up with last year's champ Roger Barkan (previous Slashdot coverage). If you just like puzzles, register here for the most intense (and fastest) 2-1/2 hours of the year. For a faint shadow of the real thing, take the practice test, which Barkan can probably complete in about 8 minutes; for a true challenge, the complete 2004 test is still available."
What the hell is a transhuman, and why don't I have one??
If I understand Dirac correctly, his meaning is this: there is no God, and Dirac is his Prophet. -Pauli
I can't even figure out how to start the test. It reminds me of the joke where you paint on an index card on both sides,"How do you confuse a moron? Flip card."
Password:
The test is a PDF/Acrobat 5 file. You must have at least the Adobe Acrobat 4 reader (v5.1 not recommended). Download the latest Acrobat Reader here.
2. Read Preview Instructions Run Acrobat and decrypt the Preview Instructions file using the password shown above. You should print and read the Preview Instructions well in advance
God spoke to me.
and the answer was 42
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
They should invite Kim Peek. You know, the guy who inspired the movie "Rain Man."
http://users.lk.net/~stepanov/mnemo/kimpeeke.html
Or are idiot savants barred from such competitions?
http://augustwestproducts.i8.com
Password: See Below
The test is a PDF/Acrobat 5 file. You must have at least the Adobe Acrobat 4 reader (v5.1 not recommended). Download the latest Acrobat Reader here.
2. Read Preview Instructions Run Acrobat and decrypt the Preview Instructions file using the password shown above. You should print and read the Preview Instructions well in advance
God spoke to me.
To download the files to disk:
On PC's - Right click on the link and save file to disk
I stopped here. How about you guys?
I wonder if any subject or news item could be unrelated to transhumanism.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
2004:
- instructions: endeavor
- test: xcode6fire
2005:
- instructions: hello
- test: kronos
Ever since I switched from palm to pocketpc I have sorely missed vexed, possibly the best puzzle game I have ever played. On my desktop I play chess. What puzzle games do you guys know for either desktop windows or pocketpc?
Sorry - you fail already.
Did you not read the bit where it said "Password (see notes below)"?
And below there was a link to follow to get the password. Clever password it was too - very apt for a challenging puzzle; a nice reference to those who came before them.
So howcome Google doesn't hire the top X contestants? I assumed that was why they made this competition - to find qualified employees? Afaik, none of the participants has been hired.
... I am an MBA student (honor student, at that) and I could not get close to any of these questions. I mean, it wasn't even approximately in my reach. F*ck.
No, just kidding. I got stuck on the practice puzzle when it asked for a password. I have my cluster working on that though.
Not *too* painfully obvious.
One building a size larger in front of another removes it from view. So to see 3 buildings, possible combinations are:
1243 - 4 blocks 3
1342 - 4 blocks 2
2341 - 4 blocks 1
1324 - 3 blocks 2
2314 - 3 blocks 1
2134 - 2 blocks 1
The "4" requirement makes this one pretty easy, as you can see from the above list that only one possible combination has a "2" in the third slot.
Yeah, in 2312.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Wu :: Riddles
And here I thought I was being clever by using as the password.
3 down, 2 to go for me.
Well, I think I got an answer for the 1st one:
A) In the column with 4 buildings (top to bottom): 1 2 3 4
B Column with 3 buildings: 1 3 2 4 (number 2 corresponds to A column)
C Column with 2 buildings(bottom to top) : 1 4 3 2
(3 corresponds to B Column)
Mmm... the other numbers you can put whatever you want.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
...but way too slowly. I have no idea how the champions can churn through 25 of these in two and a half hours--that's one every six minutes. Yikes!
(Just to demonstrate that I have finished--the diagonal sums to 12 for the first one, and to 18 in the second, no hints on the third, the first three blocks sum to the size of the fourth block for number 4, and the diagonal on the last ends with "YES". You can probably get all these answers by pretending to have finished and looking at the answer key, but I haven't bothered trying that again, so I'm not really sure.)
I get the feeling that the "find the image that..." puzzles would be a lot easier if you printed out the document and cut them up. I wonder if that's within the rules?
I am so sick of people calling themselves "transhumans" there are *no* transhumans, there are only people who advocate it, aka. transhumanists. (yeah and before you say it some dude with a pacermaker is "transhuman".... right...).
To be a transhumanist you have to advocate the marriage of machines, technology (nanotech, biotech) with humans. But on the whole the people who advocate such a theory haven't considered the moral, philosophical and even technical implications of transhumanism and tend to be incredibly ignorant apes.
For example. when I use a computer, am I not augmenting myself? A hammer? Am I not a cyborg, am I not transhuman when I get inside a car or ride a bike? How are these different from being able to replace legs with wheels? How is google different from having an auto-memory?
Oh that's right, you like to make a big deal out of your little "futurist" theory because the future is "cool" and you haven't the capacity to see the wonders and operations of technology in our present day and age. There are no end of these people preying on the "coolness" of the "future" like the college professor who claims a chip in his arm makes him the first cyborg, forgetting the first pacemaker, or hearing aid. Forgeting the sword and the bow.
Transhumanists and futurists etc. are without deviation snake oil salesmen and dreamers. I am not saying thinking about the future is bad, but thinking in such utterly *stupid* terms is worthy of contempt.
Without fail, these people are from the sciences, who may gave a better grasp of the potential technologies, but in their ignorance of history forget how radical the changes that have already occured have been.
Go to any "transhumanist" website or description and it will be *dripping* in buzzwords and bullshit. The problems, questions and answers to the singularity, skynet, and other AI fantasies or to transhumanism and the "posthuman" condition won't be found in some over-cooked science drop-outs rantings, they will be found in a proper philosophical and cultural analysis.
I will stress again, I am not saying these questions aren't interesting. But transhumanism is a proto-cult about the promise of the future dreamed up by those who do not fit into the present (not a bad thing) and fail to see why (stupid).
Maybe this means they are not trying to find people who can come up with algorithmic solutions.
Or maybe they are but they don't want fast coding ability to be a factor.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
If they can get "Google Puzzle Championship" stuck in all our heads, it helps preserve their image as the place where all the smartest geeks hang out. That's the kind of advertising money can't buy, at least directly.
Plus, it's fun and they felt like it. That's how the whole Google thing started in the first place, right?
Educators and psychologists often categorize people by the method of learning/analyzing that is most effective for each person. [visual, kinesthetic, and aural are the three common options] And unlike the vast majority of people, visual cues are not my primary method. In fact, visual reasoning is dead last for me. A few examples: word searches are incredibly challenging for me, if I drop anything in tall grass I have a difficult time finding it, I'm terrible at visually estimating volume, etc.
However, in most regards I would be considered to have above-average intelligence. Fantastic memory, strong lateral thinking, keen reasoning, etc. So I am continually aware that puzzles, IQ tests, and brain teasers always have a strong visual bias. Perhaps it is just a matter of convenience that visual puzzles are easier to represent on paper. But I wish that puzzles like this could incorporate more aural, kinesthetic, or narrative reasoning skills.
Like all puzzles of this nature (or all things in nature, if you will), it's simply pattern recognition.
Mind you, these are low probability patterns, and "normal" (the mean of a given social index) people have trouble with identifying low probability relationships between objects.
I love these kinds of tests, but I've always assumed that they represented subconscious abnormality to "tap in" to the human brains raw pattern recognition ability.
Does that mean you can teach yourself to solve problems of this nature? Or is it simply a handful of odd neural pathways that formed during the developmental period that make the connection between these relationships easier for you to identify (Chaos theory rears its ugly head again)?
For the question that asks you to find the picture that's the same as the mirror image, just cross or blur your eyes to create a stereogram of any two images.
Look for the spot in the two images makes your eyes hurt, and that's what's different about that image.
Repeat until you can match up each of those differences to the main image, and there's your solution.
Unfortunately, this tecnique has the slight side effect of leaving you unable to focus on anything on your monitor, so I cannot be held respponsible if this message has any typos.
Oh and I was able to load the PDF in my browser, not saving it to disk first. They should give me extra points for that!
For the first problem, the sum of each row and column is 10.
For the second problem, the sum of each row, column, white region, and gray region is 28.
Or try www.notpron.com instead.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
A lot of good points.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
First of all, thank you for writing this. I'd also like to thank the one who modded it up.
I am so sick of people calling themselves "transhumans" there are *no* transhumans, there are only people who advocate it, aka. transhumanists. (yeah and before you say it some dude with a pacermaker is "transhuman".... right...).
I am not a full transhuman. I would like to be one.
To be a transhumanist you have to advocate the marriage of machines, technology (nanotech, biotech) with humans. But on the whole the people who advocate such a theory haven't considered the moral, philosophical and even technical implications of transhumanism and tend to be incredibly ignorant apes.
No, to be a transhuman...you have to be transhuman.
For example. when I use a computer, am I not augmenting myself? A hammer? Am I not a cyborg, am I not transhuman when I get inside a car or ride a bike? How are these different from being able to replace legs with wheels? How is google different from having an auto-memory?
The line is usually given as the skin. Having had a castration done, I am technically posthuman in a nonsuperficial way.
Oh that's right, you like to make a big deal out of your little "futurist" theory because the future is "cool" and you haven't the capacity to see the wonders and operations of technology in our present day and age. There are no end of these people preying on the "coolness" of the "future" like the college professor who claims a chip in his arm makes him the first cyborg, forgetting the first pacemaker, or hearing aid. Forgeting the sword and the bow.
It will be interesting. "Cool" is not a technical term, and has little meaning.
Transhumanists and futurists etc. are without deviation snake oil salesmen and dreamers. I am not saying thinking about the future is bad, but thinking in such utterly *stupid* terms is worthy of contempt.
Sure you can make money off it. A good amount really are dreamers (not a bad thing) and not out to make money.
Without fail, these people are from the sciences, who may gave a better grasp of the potential technologies, but in their ignorance of history forget how radical the changes that have already occured have been.
Is this worse than the inevitable ethicists, philosophers, and theologians that crop up in any article on contraversial science?
Go to any "transhumanist" website or description and it will be *dripping* in buzzwords and bullshit. The problems, questions and answers to the singularity, skynet, and other AI fantasies or to transhumanism and the "posthuman" condition won't be found in some over-cooked science drop-outs rantings, they will be found in a proper philosophical and cultural analysis.
They will be found in both.
I will stress again, I am not saying these questions aren't interesting. But transhumanism is a proto-cult about the promise of the future dreamed up by those who do not fit into the present (not a bad thing) and fail to see why (stupid).
I don't fit into the present.
Transcend Humanity. Please.
That's against the rules, but I'm sure that someone will do that. But that won't help with the rest of the puzzles. Someone who is good at these will be able to do it faster than someone using Photoshop anyway.
For #4 Corral, can the border corners touch each other? (i.e. in their example, look at the 7, then extend the border just for this example, adding only the block below 7, making its corner touch the corner of 2...) If you can have them touch like that, then I don't really even know how to approch this :(
Got 1 - 3 though
To download the files to disk: On PC's - Right click on the link and save file to disk
On MAC's - Click and hold on the link and save file to disk
I'm already confused. Who is PC? And on PC's what? Right- Click on what?
For that matter, Mac's what? Who is Mac?
Clearly a case of misplaced apostrophes here.
But that's another puzzle, I assume...
.
- aqk
F U
Haha
This is why people like you and me will never be able to succeed in a test like that.
When I read the story and went to the site, I went "great... They advertize a test that happened two days ago. Zonk is starting to become just like the others." and I was trying to find when the submitter submit his news.
I was maybe 20 minutes into the practice test when I thought.. "Hey.. we're saturday. Test couldn't have been may 18th!".
Of course not.. The test is on June 18th. In one month.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
Since they give the directions to the puzzle in advance, most or all of them could also be coded in advance. Also, most of them can be solved fairly easily using brute-force combinatorics. If using a computer was allowed, and a day in advance to read the directions for each puzzle and write some code, I could probably solve every one of those problems very quickly (mostly the time to enter in the specifics of the problem).
This seems like a tough competition. Or maybe I'm just stupid?
Admin RuneScape Community Board
You're correct at first, but you can't put the other numbers whereever you want, as you can't repeat them.
So the block will look like:
a nice reference to those who came before them
Yup! Incredibles!
Since they give the directions to the puzzle in advance, most or all of them could also be coded in advance.
Oh yes? For the 2004 test, what kind of process would you create from the directions, "How many circles are either shown or implied by the diagram?"
Or take number 19, "Corral". From the directions and the example, how would you anticipate that the actual problem used a hex grid instead of a square grid, requiring a very different approach?
And even for the ones where the instructions are fairly clear, just how many of them could you really code (and debug!) in 24 hours? Number 22 for instance, where your program has to allow for competition-time entry of several different factors (the puzzle background, the totals, the circles for horizontal and vertical pairings).
For now, the human brain is still the most versatile (and most rapidly reprogrammable) problem-solving computer.
I figure by 2030 or so my 6-digit UID will be something to brag about.
I thought you need to be able to see 3 buildings in the second row. Wouldn't 1324 mean you can only see the first 2 buildings because the 3 would block the 2?