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Puzzle Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Google US Puzzle Championship 141

Posted by CmdrTaco from the how-about-tic-tac-toe dept.
friedegg writes "Google has announced their sponsorship of the US Puzzle Championship, which they describe as a "a national online competition to identify America's most logical minds." Two winners will join the US Puzzle Team, and head to the Netherlands for the World Puzzle Championship in October. The US Puzzle Championship will be held Sunday, May 31 at 1pm EDT, but registration closes tomorrow, May 29 at 9pm EDT! Make sure you read the rules of the challenge if you plan to participate. The rules note that "Members of the Canadian puzzle team may also be selected using this test. Unofficial participation is open to all puzzlers world-wide.""
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Google US Puzzle Championship More

Google US Puzzle Championship

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  • ... seeing RED over these title colors??

  • Heard of the Eternity Puzzle? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Michael's a Jerk! ( 668185 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:01AM (#6066225) Homepage Journal
    I want to meet the man who solves it.

    The Eternity Puzzle is a new type of jigsaw. Unlike normal jigsaw puzzles, there is no picture - every piece is the same shade of green on both sides. All we know about the finished result is that it forms a regular dodecagon (12 sided polygon). The pieces don't have bumps or indentations, either, and all the edges are straight lines. This means that, when anyone looks at the puzzle, they can see that there many different ways to put two pieces together. An additional problem is that almost any two pieces can be placed together while leaving space for other pieces to go around them.

    You can tell that this particular jigsaw has been designed to be extremely hard to solve. So hard, in fact, that the inventor has offered one million pounds to the first person who solves it, as long as they do it within the next five years. That is an awful lot of money just for completing a jigsaw, and you might think that it wouldn't take all that long.

    However, when you first start trying to solve it, you'll soon see that there are far too many ways to start which go wrong. Firstly, though, a couple of things to point out about how you can improve your chances of going right.

    With the puzzle you get a backing sheet of paper with some grid lines on it, as well as the exact location of one of the 209 numbered pieces. All pieces differ in shape, so being able to put a unique piece in position will help at least a little. There are also three much smaller puzzles available to buy, similar in idea but with far fewer pieces (less than 30 pieces each). If you solve those then you are told the locations of additional pieces in the Eternity puzzle, so you can fix 4 or 5 of the piece positions immediately.

    The grid lines on the backing paper are also very useful. The backing paper is drawn up into equilateral triangles, just like isometric paper with three sets of parallel lines drawn on it. Each of the pieces can be placed on this grid so that the edges either go along the grid lines, or cut the equilateral triangles exactly in half. So every piece can be oriented in 12 different ways, only one of which will be right.

    The number of ways to orient these pieces, even if you get all the clues available, is 12204. That's just trying to get all the pieces placed at the correct angles, not even trying to put them together on the board! When we start trying to put pieces together, the number of different ways to try becomes truly staggering!

    It is extremely hard to come up with an exact number of ways of putting the pieces together "wrongly". To count them we would need to go through exhaustively checking each case, adding pieces until we couldn't add any more correctly, then taking out one of the pieces and trying again. The estimate I came up with for the total number of ways to attempt to solve it was 10500. So if you tried, just once, to solve the Eternity puzzle, then your odds of getting the million pounds would be about 1 in 10500. Compare this to the odds of the National Lottery - 1 in 14 million. The odds of getting this puzzle right, first time, are about the same as the odds of the same set of 6 numbers coming up as the National Lottery numbers every Saturday for a year and a half.

    Those are just the odds if you try it once. So you might think you could just get a computer to try all the options, and it won't take very long to find the right one. It's a nice idea, and in many problems it's the right way to go. However, the number of different ways to attempt Eternity is so large that even having hundreds of thousands of computers helping out won't really do you much good. If you had one million computers, each testing out 50 million possible ways to solve the puzzle every second, then every day you would be testing less than 1019 possibilities. At that rate, it would take the computers longer than the age of the universe to sort through all the possible solutions.

    As far as I can tell, the million pounds looks safe.
  • AHHH, is no one else scared by the redness of this stories title?

  • Here is a link (Score:5, Informative)

    by Uart ( 29577 ) <feedback AT life ... property DOT com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:04AM (#6066240) Homepage Journal
    Here [www.kira.cz] is a flash sideshow od some sample questions. In case anyone was wondering just what kind of puzzles they are talking about.

    • Sample puzzles in HTML format (Score:5, Informative)

      by alistair ( 31390 ) <alistair.hotldap@com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:57AM (#6066393)
      For those without Flash, or who want to see an alternative selection to print out, the WPO site itself has a page of them here [worldpuzzle.org].

      These also seem vulnrable to brute force computation, although they are a lot harder than the Flash puzzles linked above. (the solutions are also provided :-) )

    • Re:Here is a link (Score:4, Interesting)

      by qortra ( 591818 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:18AM (#6066474)
      Thanks for that link.

      From what I saw there, it seems to me that describing the competition as a search for the "most logical minds" is probably inaccurate. Although many solutions can probably divined by logic, it seems to me that most of the solutions require a more creative mind to solve within the time limit. Any thoughts?
      • I too read that and pondered.

        The creativity required for problem-solving, I believe, must far exceed one's ability at logic if one is to be any good at most puzzles. Lateral thinking and the ability to make great leaps of inference (rather than plug away logically attempting a linear solution) is often what makes a great thinker - Einstein, for example. People who are able to make leaps - bypassing linear solutions - are surely the ones who will solve the most difficult puzzles?

        From a more computational
    • Dude, your link starts the puzzles at 3. Here [www.kira.cz] is a link that starts them at 1.
      I saw the solutions for the first 2 and I thought I was looking at an entirely new set of puzzles!
      Cheers, though, of the 11 I took, I got 5 right (3, 5, 9, 10, and 13), which isn't bad, I guess...:-) .
      What were they talking about when they said "Find the alien", though? I don't understand that at all.
      • What were they talking about when they said "Find the alien"

        Which 1 doesn't match the other 3.

        I thought the Flash puzzles kinda sucked. The "alien" workding was awkward. For the one where you had to figure the 2 numbers in the middle of the sequence, there were no instructions on how to solve it. What was I supposed to do? Click one, type a number, click the other, type the other number? Or was it multiple choice and the graphics I was supposed to click on didn't load? I didn't know. And the "Displace on
      • "Find the Alien"
        To quote sesame street: One of these things is not like the other, can you guess which one?

  • How will Google Enforce 'No Cheating'? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Red Pointy Tail ( 127601 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:14AM (#6066268)
    From the 'rulez':

    Outside help of any kind is not permitted. This means: no assistance of any kind from any other person; also no books, calculators, computers, or tools other than items explicitly permitted. You are allowed to use writing implements, erasers, paper, and any items explicitly required to solve a specific problem. (All such items are listed on the Hints and Tips page.)


    How is this enforceable if it's free-for-all over the web?

    Also, from the sample questions from the Dutch version of it, many of the questions seems to yield to a brute-force computational approach.

    • Re:How will Google Enforce 'No Cheating'? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by untaken_name ( 660789 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:39AM (#6066322) Homepage
      Outside help of any kind is not permitted. This means: no assistance of any kind from any other person; also no books, calculators, computers, or tools other than items explicitly permitted. You are allowed to use writing implements, erasers, paper, and any items explicitly required to solve a specific problem. (All such items are listed on the Hints and Tips page.)
      How is this enforceable if it's free-for-all over the web?

      Well, it might not be enforceable for this preliminary test, but if you cheat your way onto the team, you have only huge embarassment waiting for you. I don't think it would be worth it to cheat in this instance. It would come out when you got to the contest and couldn't perform.
    • Also, from the sample questions from the Dutch version of it, many of the questions seems to yield to a brute-force computational approach.

      Yep, this is a pretty obvious way to approach it. Indeed, a team from the Information Technology and Systems faculty at the Delft Technical University [tudelft.nl] in Holland have published a report on how they did exactly that.

      My Dutch isn't all that great (I spent 12 months as a postdoctoral researcher in their operating systems software distribution group working on a Beowulf

    • They are probably talking about the finals, which are not done over the web. It wouldn't do you much good to cheat in the preliminaries if you have to do it all on your own in the finals, you'd sink like a stone...
  • I hope they still include a Rubik's cube speed contest. I'll never forget seeing someone solve one on TV in about 3 seconds... amazing!

    • Re:Rubiks' cube speed contest? (Score:5, Informative)

      by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:49AM (#6066356) Homepage Journal
      3 seconds? No, that's physically impossible. Was that a typo for 23? The (unofficial) world record for the fastest average is about 17 seconds, and if the solver got lucky I guess they can shave off a couple of seconds off that, but not any less.

      • I think he was referring to the Rubik's Magic Puzzle (not the cube), which can be solved in three seconds. I remember seeing the competitions on TV, during the 80's.

      • I remember that, as a kid, I once solved the cube in 39 seconds. Maybe I had a lucky start, but (at the time) I knew all the moves. Yes, I did learn them from a cheat book, but 39 seconds is still pretty fast. :-)
      • If it is an average the solver must have solved it in under 17 seconds, half of the time. But maybe your point was the solver's standard deviation wasn't very high so the minimum time wasn't much less than 17 seconds?
      • wouldn't that depend on how scrambled it was?
        I mean, if all you had to do was 1 twist... ;)

        What pissed me off, I 'solved' it, meaning got all the colors back in order. Then 2 days later there was a guy doing it on TV some unbelievable time. Totally over-shadowed the fact that I compeated it with out in 'cheats'.
    • 16.5 [chello.nl]

      22.95 [chello.nl]

      Dutch Cube Day in Leiden [speedcubing.com]
    • You know, I actually entered one of those once. I was so disappointed to watch everybody whip out their cheat books before the contest for some last minute studying. Stupid me had entered it without ever reading one of those books. Needless to say I didn't win.

      I'll always remember the "stage mother" of the kid next to me at the table. When the judge explained that you would hand your cube to the player to your right to scramble, the mother was all "He's gonna get that back, right? He's got it just the

      • when i was a kid (Score:5, Funny)

        by SolemnDragon ( 593956 ) <solemndragon AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday May 29, 2003 @09:12AM (#6066781) Homepage Journal
        when i was maybe five, i solved one in two minutes... with a screwdriver. My mum handed one to each of us and told us to make the colours all the same on every side. So we did. My sister took off all the stickers and put them on again as well as she could. I took a look at the stickers and decided they wouldn't peel well, so i just took it apart and out it back together again. She knew how sis had done hers, she couldn't figure out how i'd done mine till i handed her the screwdriver. She started locking the toolbox after that. *sigh* and it was a looong time before i got my own toolset. Funny, that- if you can't use a tool they worry that you're gonna hurt yourself with it... if you CAN, they worry about what you're going to use it on next...
        • There was this guy that I knew that could solve them in about four minutes - so I very carefuly heated the stickers on the corners with a hair driver and pealed them off with a razor and swaped them around. The cube became unsolvable - the relationships were just off for the cornet cubes.

          It was facinating to watch him continually fail over the course of a weekend - I helpfully sugested that watching too much Red Dwarf could do that to one's mind.

          • Hehe, I've had people swap stickers on me to try and fool me. When I tell them which stickers they moved within 2 minutes, the look on their faces is priceless. I usually solve a cube in 3-4 minutes. I memorized a method from a book years and years ago. It's terribly inefficient but I've gotten it pretty fast over the years. I've just never cared enough to learn a better method.

            --Atlantix
          • Thanks, now i'm stuck with the image of a hologram and a catperson fighting over a rubik's cube made of silver plastic and light-brite pegs.... *grin* on the other hand, that image nicely crowds out the pile of work at hand, so maybe that's not a sarcastic thanks, after all!
        • Popping off the pieces of a rubix cube is the fastest way to 'solve' the puzzle. Several weeks ago my company took everyone to an NHL game. On the bus there was a contest to see who could solve a rubix cube in the shorted amount of time. I got one cube and immediately started pulling pieces off. Meanwhile the other one was being passed around from person to person trying to solve it manually and getting nowhere. Sure enough I handed one in first and a bunch of us started laughing. There was no prize so
        • This reminds me of a saying (I think it was a smalltalk quote-of-the day):

          "Never trust a programmer with a screwdriver."
          • Not since i showed up at a party with a 3-foot screwdriver as a weapon. I have friends who will never allow me to handle a screwdriver ever again. Ever.

            *sigh* Something about a four-foot-ten me running around after someone waving it in the air yelling "SCROOOOOOODROOOOOVERRRRRR," my pigtails flying behind me. Um, right, did i mention this was only a couple of years ago, when i was 24?? On the bright side, nobody got pictures, so nobody has proof...

  • D'oh! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:18AM (#6066275)
    America?s most logical minds"

    Oddly appropriate for the topic to have a question mark in there.

    • Oddly appropriate for the topic to have a question mark in there.

      American Public Shools' do an excelent job, of teaching punctuation!

      Its just were lossers at speling.

  • Yikes (Score:5, Funny)

    by The-Bus ( 138060 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:40AM (#6066325)
    You know what would be really embarassing? If people started Googling for the right answers.

  • From wpc.puzzles.com... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 29, 2003 @07:45AM (#6066342)
    Perhaps this Google search will find you!
    In Soviet Russia... oh, nevermind. Now they're building the jokes into the articles, this is really getting out of hand!

  • My favorite puzzle (Score:3, Insightful)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:00AM (#6066403) Homepage Journal
    ... is the knight's tour of the chessboard. The problem is to move a knight on an empty chessboard in such a way that it visits each square exactly once and returns to the starting square. Here's a little HowTo [wikipedia.org] for solving it.

  • That's just great (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Custard ( 587661 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @08:28AM (#6066546) Homepage Journal
    Those archived qualifying tests [puzzles.com] were just what I needed to make myself feel really stupid first thing in the morning.
    • If they were serious, those puzzle folks would have made the reader crack the pdf instead of just hadnding out the password.

      How in the world do you start solving the Corral puzzle? I've stared at this longer than I want to admit trying to figure out the algorthim.
  • that they let me off of work early enough to actually do this...otherwise, I registered for no reason at all. c'est la vie.
  • What's the most efficient way to Googlewhack? Let's get the greatest puzzle solving minds on that one!
  • Google finds you!
  • Bricks! I've spent thousands of hours since I found this addicting game over two years ago. It's based on the microsoft klotski game from 1991, which was based on an old Polish game. The goal sounds simple: move the master brick to the destination, but it's very hard to solve some puzzles at all, let alone in the best number of moves.

    See my link to check it out.

  • See who cracks the adobe encryption scheme.
    • LOL, I thought about that as soon as they explained the way the test is delivered. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of programs to crack adobe files, think these guys will be compotent enough to make sure its a hard password to break?

  • Read my mind questions. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by pavon ( 30274 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @11:50AM (#6068077)
    From the sample puzzles on the google page [google.com].
    Puzzle #3 - Sum Place (Craig Kasper)

    If the following are true relationships:
    PANAMA + JAPAN = 5
    FIJI + CUBA = 7
    SWEDEN + NORWAY = 9
    AUSTRIA + AUSTRALIA = 7
    What is the corresponding value for:
    CANADA + UNITED STATES = ?
    I hate questions like this. They aren't puzzle questions, they are "guess what I'm thinking" questions. I came up with three relations that satisfiy those "equations", and none of them were the "correct" answer posted on the site. I enjoyed the other two puzzles, especially Corral. I registered last night and am going to have to make special a effort to get my parent's computer completely working when I go home friday night, so I can participate saterday morning. It should be pretty fun even though I doubt I have any chance of placing.
  • Let's see, the story was "Posted by CmdrTaco on Thu May 29, '03 06:55 AM" and the site says, "Contestants must register on or before 9:00 PM EDT on Thursday, May 29". That gives us 2 hours and 5 minutes to respond. Assuming of course that you read it the instant it was posted, at 6:55. But of course I read it at 10:00.
  • I don't mean to insult those who did those puzzles on google but it is like that show on Fox several years ago, does anyone remember that? The show was "America's smartest kid" or something like that. Anyway, I was about ten when I watched that and guess what! I would have won! I am not saying that I am some prodigy but these things do not show the most logical minds in America! There is no way to show who is the MOST logical minds in America just some of the best/bravest who tryout for these kinds of thing
  • To question number 0:

    "If the deadline for entering a contest is 9 PM on a Thursday which falls on the 29th of the month, and the contest takes place on the 31st of the month, what day of the week does the contest take place on?"

    "Sunday."

    Ooops.

  • Most Logical Mind? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Thursday May 29, 2003 @03:16PM (#6069802) Journal

    the US Puzzle Championship, which they describe as a "a national online competition to identify America's most logical minds."

    Ummm... are the "most logical minds" going to be drawn to a contest where, given that your skill is an unknown, your odds of winning are 1 over all the participants?

    You can expend considerably less labor at many other endevours, and expect a much greater return. You can put $10,000 in corporate bonds these days, and still get $500 or more at the end of the year. Not too shabby. If you don't have the $10,000, just google for cheaper rent, get a 2nd job, or whatever. The really logical (though not particularly scrupulous) minds are fleecing marks in Vegas and scheming on Wall Street all the time.

    With venues like that favoring the success of a "logical mind", why fuss with some silly puzzle contest?

    Prediction: they will attract a lot of people who love puzzles, and the most logical mind within that subset will have a good chance of winning, but they will most certainly not attract the most logical minds of all, unless... there is a mind out there that's so uber that it knows it can solve any puzzle they throw at it with minimal effort. I suspect there are enough egoists who think they are that mind, but probably very few who are that good. So, unless you are the ubermind, why bother?

    • People in this contest realise that their likelihood of winning depends on their puzzle skill.

      Anyone know if this 'World Puzzle Championship' has a website?

    • Ummm... are the "most logical minds" going to be drawn to a contest where, given that your skill is an unknown, your odds of winning are 1 over all the participants?

      Most people do not go to such a contest with the sole purpose of winning. It would be quite logical to attempt such a contest even if you had no chance of winning, e.g. if you wanted to see an interesting puzzle, and see how you compare to other enthusiasts.

      You can expend considerably less labor at many other endevours, and expect a much

      • I didn't mean to come off quite so cynical as to assume that the only valid reason for doing the contest is to make money.

        However, I was being... well... logical about it. If you enjoy doing puzzles, then the contest has a value for you apart from the prize money. I guess I should have emphasized that point more.

    • why do you assume logical mind mean getting rich?
      I would say it is more logical to live simple, enjoy your life, and surround yourself with loved ones.

      They say time is money. I say time is all we got.
  • The password isn't up yet!
    • ..unless Google hosts because Puzzles.com fell to DoS! We can't get to the password for the encrypted contest pdf!

      I just downloaded the contest pdf at 2kb a second, and the password is still not up! At one point, the site said there was no web site configured at that address....

      The documentation in the rulebook said They did not expect to have any technical problems during this event. Hahaha.
  • Looks like the server is backed up.
  • Uh... anyone who cracked the password protection on the question sheet yesterday willing to put up a mirror?
  • i am trying to download the contest right now and it looks like their site isn't taking the load. way to plan for the additional traffic. I am downloading at a whopping 367 bytes per second and it has already failed several times.
    • The whole thing stank. It took me nearly 15 minutes to get the password, then it took like a dozen tries to submit my answers at the end, smacking me with 14 minutes worth of penalties, which I'm pretty sure will give me a negative overall score...

      What a waste of a saturday morning.. I had looked forward to this but the whole thing was completely ruined by their lousy server. They'll have no hope of guaranteeing the people with the highest scores are really the brightest candidates.. they just had faster

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