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2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship is Open

Posted by Zonk on Fri Jun 09, 2006 09:15 PM
from the how-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk dept.
Puzzle Games (Games) Businesses Google The Internet
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."
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Related Stories

[+] 2004 U.S. Puzzle Championship Winners 103 comments
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."
[+] 2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship 121 comments
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."
[+] Google-Sponsored 2004 US Puzzle Championship 115 comments
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."
[+] Technology: 2006 Google U.S Puzzle Championship Results 12 comments
Kannappan writes "The complete results of the 2006 Google U.S Puzzle Championship have been announced. The online competition which featured more than 850 participants from all over the world had 23 interesting logical puzzles that were to be solved within the stipulated timeframe of 150 minutes. Usual suspects Zack Butler, Wei Hwa Huang, and Ulrich Voigt emerged in the top bracket but it was Thomas Snyder, a chemistry graduate student at Harvard, who finished with the topmost score of 370 points. Thomas, Wei Hwa, Zack and Roger Barkan will represent United States in the World Puzzle Championship which will be held in October at Borovets, Bulgaria. Interestingly the current world chess champion Veselin Topalov hails from Bulgaria."
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2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship is Open 50 Comments More /

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  • Oh noes (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kelz (611260) on Friday June 09 2006, @09:24PM (#15507266)
    Practice tests /.ed, .5KB/sec.

    Note: Don't try to open the practice tests in IE/Firefox (with adobe reader), save to desktop.
    • too late..... Theres an extension that avoids opening PDF directly, gotta install it.
      • extension for pdf download https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/636/ [mozilla.org]

      • Re:Oh noes (Score:5, Informative)

        by Volanin (935080) on Friday June 09 2006, @10:02PM (#15507384)
        Theres an extension that avoids opening PDF directly, gotta install it.

        Although extensions are cool, this is overkill.
        This is a configuration in the Adobe Reader for that.
        Just go EDIT, PREFERENCES, INTERNET... and uncheck Display PDF in Browser.
        • This is a configuration in the Adobe Reader for that. Just go EDIT, PREFERENCES, INTERNET... and uncheck Display PDF in Browser.

          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

    • Note: Don't try to open the practice tests in IE/Firefox (with adobe reader), save to desktop. It might be OK if you use Adobe Reader 7 with Adobe Reader Speed Launch. I hated Acrobat 6 because it was so slow on startup, especially the browser plugin. But with version 7, it's blazingly fast. If you don't have it yet, get it. If you use PDFs at all, it'll save you lots of time.
  • Well, for the anagrams part of the puzzles, you can use my site: Anagrammer [wineverygame.com]
  • Took 20 minutes to download 288KB and now cant even open it.
    I guess this is part of the puzzle...

  • Bandwidth issues (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2006, @10:09PM (#15507398)
    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

  • Hmm (Score:2, Informative)

    by Oopsallberries (980852)
    Wouldn't open for me after I downloaded it. Weird.

  • They should recruit at MIT Mystery Hunt (Score:4, Informative)

    by JelloJoe (977764) on Friday June 09 2006, @10:43PM (#15507488)
    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/ [mit.edu]

  • Sample quiz question. (Score:3, Informative)

    by babbling (952366) on Friday June 09 2006, @11:27PM (#15507590)
    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.
    • 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
    • The method I used for the groundhog version was to assign a numeric value to each seperate groundhog "pose", then writing the total at the bottom of each square. Then it's just a matter of checking the totals and seeing if squares that equal the same value are identical. Works pretty well - you can also immediately cross-off the tiles that are obviously not similar with only a few figures and such.

      N.
      • I barely got it in six minutes. I quickly eliminated by visual inspection the possibility of any matches among singles and duos of groundhogs. That saves you 9 of 36 tiles. For the remaining 27, I encoded them based on the groundhogs head orientation top to bottom -- S for center, L for left, R for right, and Z for sleeping. This was the hardest part of the puzzle because I was copying from my computer screen -- if I had a printout it would have been much easier. Then, I circled all the strings that st
    • I think that at 6 minutes per puzzle, they're quite hard enough.
    • Q1 Sudoku was really easy.

      Q2 Can't be solved with matrices/linear algebra alone. There are 10 unknowns and only 5 constraints arising from the balancing. The other constraints (using #s 1-10 exactly once) are nonlinear. I haven't finished it yet.

      Q3 was really easy. but very boring!

      Q4 was straight-forward-- a bit tedious though. You can reason your way through about 60% of the puzzle, and then the right answer sort of pops out at you.

      Q5 seems annoying; I didn't try it.
      • I'm making some progress on the train one, but am making the (safe, I think...) assumption that the train line crosses at every crossing. So I extend each crossing into the middle of the square next to it.

        Next, we are told that the track can't turn as it passes through stations. This helps, because we can see that there is only one direction in which the track can go through stations 1 and 2, and it also means that we can extend the track through stations 3 and 4 (previously in the middle of the stations) b
      • Either it's way to late or I don't understand the question, but how did you come up with your answer for number 2. I spent like 2 hours on it and couldn't get it, but still, I do not understand your solution either (although i assume it's correct).
          • Wow, I'm really mad at myself.

            I wrote down a wrong forumla for one of the 2 vs 1 weights down the tree, ie a=b+2c instead of a=2b+c causing me to get the same answer as you but with the 3 and 4 swapped. Then all the equations ended up working out but the top level large equation.

            I feel stupid now for wasting the last hour on that getting the wrong answer.
      • your solution is incorrect as 3+4 10 and 5+1 7 and 2+6 9 and 8 + 7 + 5 + 1 3 + 4 + 10 + 2 + 6 + 9...
      • as for the trains... starting from 1 2U 1L 1D 2L 1U 1R 2D 1R 2D 1R 3D 1L 2U 2L 3U 2L 2U 1R 3D 3R 3U 1R 4D 1L 1D 1R 1D 1L 1D 2R 1U 3R 1D 2L 2U 1L 1U 3R 1U 2R that should be it...

  • Mirrors (Score:3, Informative)

    by pojo (526049) * on Saturday June 10 2006, @01:15AM (#15507854)
    Mirrordot [mirrordot.org] has the test mirrored.


    The test [mirrordot.org], password: apple.
    The instructions [mirrordot.org], password: grail.

  • Here's a puzzle... (Score:3, Funny)

    by DuranDuran (252246) on Saturday June 10 2006, @03:57AM (#15508164)
    Here's a puzzle for the organizers:

    Why bother password protecting a test file from two and three years ago?

  • my 4 yr old did Q.3 in about 15 minutes.
  • 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...
  • How would you do the last two other than trying alot of combinations?
    • 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
      um, no... 2j=3h+2i
      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
      and it is j=i+3/2(h) not j = h+3/2(i).. and j != 10 :p

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