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2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship is Open
Fortran IV writes "Registration is open until June 15 for the 2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, to be held Saturday, June 17, 2006—it's 25 or so mind-bending pencil-and-paper puzzles that you have 2-1/2 very short hours to solve. The USPC is a qualifying test to choose 2 members for the U.S. team at the 2006 World Puzzle Championship to be held in Borovets, Bulgaria in October. For a mild taste of the puzzles try the 2006 Practice Test (as has been noted here in the past, if you can't get the Practice Test open you should probably give the real thing a pass!) For more of a workout the real tests for 2005 and 2004 are still available."
Practice tests /.ed, .5KB/sec.
Note: Don't try to open the practice tests in IE/Firefox (with adobe reader), save to desktop.
Well, for the anagrams part of the puzzles, you can use my site: Anagrammer
it's 25 or so mind-bending pencil-and-paper puzzles that you have 2-1/2 very short hours to solve.
should really read
it's 25 or so mind-bending pencil-and-paper puzzles that you have 2-1/2 very short hours to DOWNLOAD.
So if you are going to register for the actual test, remember to download the test well in advance, and bookmark the password page so you could start on time!
For those who would not: Remember kids, the faster you download, the larger is your IQ [penis size, wallet, etc].
Took 20 minutes to download 288KB and now cant even open it.
I guess this is part of the puzzle...
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
Just confirming the validity of the method: global warming vs pirates It clearly shows a tendency of global warming raising as pirates disminish
The best test environment is production. - Me
chrome://browser/content/browser.xul
I have done this for a couple years now. Being /.ed now is an annoyance, on puzzle day I couldn't get the password for over 20 minutes, then at the end, you can't submit your answers because everyone else was also trying. In a timed contest, this can really mess you up. Lets hope between now and the 17th they get their network issues resolved.
the 3rd "annual" puzzle is now in force. please remember that "teh" and "pwn'd" are "funny" words and not "real" words when attempting this puzzle
Wouldn't open for me after I downloaded it. Weird.
One of the more hardcore puzzling events each year is held at MIT. I competed in it this year and had a blast. For more info, go here http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/
Answer is 42.
Thanks for that! Just updated settings on my system. BUT, I woul dlove to have a lightweight (i.e. small and quick-to-load) alternative to Adobe Acrobat for viewing (and printing) PDF files. I'e grown accustomed to some of the quirks of the user interface, my main complaint with Acrobat is its slow startup speed. That, and at least on my system, Acrobat 6.0 has a working set of about 35 MB. (As reported by sysinternals.com's amazingly powerful Process Explorer utility.
I did some cursory googling a week or so ago, but couldn't find what I was looking for. It looks like ghostscript might be useful for this? Has anyone tried it?
The newer version (7?) is much, much faster.
Is the difficulty similar to the difficulty of the real quiz? It doesn't seem that difficult.
Q1 is just a Sudoku that doesn't seem too hard.
Q2 can be solved with matrices.
Q3 involves finding the features easiest to compare and comparing all tiles with that feature (eg. one groundhog, two groundhogs, three groundhogs), comparing them, and then crossing out tiles that are definitely not similar to any others.
Yup -- I've been using gv to read PDFs in linux. It's fast, it's practically everywhere and I hapen to be familiar with the interface from over a decade of noodling with PostScript.
It ain't much to write home about, I'd say (no such thing as 'search for a keyword' etc) but for the usual reading of a normal document it's sure adequate. I like that I can mark particular pages and then print or save only those pages. Handy feature, that.
We're all born with nothing.
If you die in debt, you're ahead.
durr... where password? /me likes fruit
Actually, I noticed after posting that the later questions are worth significantly more points, and do seem a fair bit harder.
Anyway...
Q1:
3164275
7235641
5421736
4612357
1573462
6357124
2746513
Q3:
A1-D4
C2-B4
E2-E5
Glad to hear it! BUT...
Better still does anyone know of a forum where this has already been discussed?
Thanks for the reply; I'll have to check it out! Its a shame to not have text search, though the page selection capability for saving and printing sounds very useful. Do you know if an .EXE is available for Windows XP? Ideally, I'd LOVE to see a Firefox Extension which encapsulated ghostview into a tab, too, but could not find such an animal. I don't have time to investigate it now, but maybe it's time for me to "scratch an itch" and write my first extension. Thanks again!
Give Foxit Reader a try (the download link is on the left). It's super fast, integrates with IE and Firefox and has ctrl-f search functionality. PCWorld rates it higher than Acrobat Reader. I've only ever had trouble with one PDF and unfortunately that's the PDF in the article - the password 'grail' isn't opening it.
If you're running Windows, there's Foxit Reader. It's a 1.5 MB download, uses less memory, and loads almost instantly. In about 2 years of use, I've only encountered a single PDF that it wouldn't open.
If you're not on Windows, there's xpdf, Evince, kpdf, gv, and probably a dozen others.
Maybe not
The test, password: apple.
The instructions, password: grail.
2-1/2 hours = 3/2 hours != 2,5 hours
Here's a puzzle for the organizers:
Why bother password protecting a test file from two and three years ago?
"You can justify anything by putting it in quotes, adding a famous name and making it a sig" - Albert Einstein
FoxitReader can open that PDF file fine: ensure you do not have a truncated download.
I'd write something here, but the subject says it all, really.
Getting rid of all the plugins that you do not use will make it load very quickly indeed. Below I paste from http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/acroread.html
Adobe Reader 7.0 is much faster than Adobe Reader 6.0.x, so if you're using Windows 2000 or later, the first thing to try is upgrading to Adobe Reader 7.0.
Adobe Reader 6.0 can be dreadfully slow. You can speed it up by disabling unused Adobe Reader plugins. To do this, move all files and folders that are in the Adobe Reader plug_ins folder to the Adobe Reader optional folder, except for the following:
* eBook.api
* EWH32.api
* Search.api
It has been reported that without the additional plugins, Adobe Reader can start up in as little as 15% of the original startup time. If you need functionality provided by other plugins, simply copy them back from the optional folder to the plug_ins folder.
In addition, you can disable the splash screen and checking for updates in the Startup section of the Adobe Reader Preferences.
my 4 yr old did Q.3 in about 15 minutes.
This does work wonders. I was going to post it, but it looks like i dont have to. It only takes a moment to make this change and it is a huge savings in time. I did this on alot of computers before v7.
Mod parent up
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
Label the weights top-to-bottm, left-to-right, as A (next row) B C D E F G (next row) H I J
Assuming the "mobile" is in static equilibrium, the torque around each of the axes (big black dots) sums to zero.
So for the bottom dot, we have clockwise torque (force x distance) = 2J and counterclockwise torque is 3H + 2I. So you have one equation:
2J = 3H + 3I
Same for the two dots in the next row up:
2B + C = D and E = F + 2G
For the top axis:
A + 2(E + F + G) = B + C + D + H + I + J
I came to a solution quickly by trial and error using the first three equations by finding combinations of the numbers 1-10 exclusive that work in those and checking them with the last equation.
Try it. Find 9 numbers between 1 and 10 than work in the following. Rearranging a bit:
J = H + 3/2(I)
E = F + 2G
D = C + 2B
You can see that I must be even because J & H are integers. And since J is = 10 I can only be 2, 4, or 6.
G and B must be less than 5 since E and D can't be more than 10. etc..
Good luck!
Methinks that the designers were influenced by the Dan Brown book "The DaVinci Code". Using "apple" as a password? Could be a coincidence, but I doubt it...
Oh, was that my outside voice?
I opened the PDF using 'grail' and Foxit reader. No issues whatsoever. My foxit is relatively recent install...maybe you need a new version?
My UID is the product of 2 primes.
How would you do the last two other than trying alot of combinations?