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2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship 121

Posted by Zonk from the riddle-me-this-slashdot dept.
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."
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2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship More

2005 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship

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  • I obviously could never compete. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by CrazyJim1 ( 809850 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @02:58AM (#12597417) Journal
    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

  • I took the practice test (Score:5, Funny)

    by MoreDruid ( 584251 ) <moredruid&gmail,com> on Saturday May 21, 2005 @02:58AM (#12597419) Journal

    and the answer was 42

  • Anyone call up Kim Peek? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Delilah Jones ( 852061 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @02:59AM (#12597424)
    They should invite Kim Peek. You know, the guy who inspired the movie "Rain Man."

    http://users.lk.net/~stepanov/mnemo/kimpeeke.html [lk.net]

    Or are idiot savants barred from such competitions?

    • Kim Peek can't compete, he's able to do a few tasks extremely efficiently, very very well, and his brain houses an enormous amount of archived data but any challenge outside his narrow range of useless natural abilities and he falls flat on his face. He wasn't born a creative genius, just a genius.
      --
      Random Signature #1
      Generated by SlashdotRndSig [snop.com] via GreaseMonkey [mozdev.org]
    • Difrent kind of inteligence , I dare say even people like Einstein or Da-vinci would not gotten to far on these types of puzzles.
      Idiot savants are masters of a certain skills(or more) , yet will seem to have very low inteligence when challanged in areas outside of their experties I belive Kim Peeke was a master of calculations and acruing information , so i dare say logic puzzles would be outside his field .
      • Hold on, isn't da Vinci usually held up as the kind of person who would do well on these kind of tests? Ya know, renaissance man and all that.
        • .A brilliant man
          he was skilled in many things.
          painting / drawing / sculpture
          civil engineering / geology
          architecture / mechanical inventions
          anatomy
          creative writing / story telling
          philosophy
          journaling / self-promotion
          musician / vocalist
          He was a thinker and could come up with soloutions to work in the real world , his abstract inteligence was brilliant but it was let out in his creative vive , his painting and music , I do not belive he would have been all that skilled at abstract puzzles .Add
        • Not really. Da Vinci would nowadays probably be diagnosed with ADD. He was highly interested in many, many things and quite incapable of finishing most of them.
          • Good thing we have drugs to cure such horrible disorders nowadays, eh? ;)
            • If treated properly ADD/ADHD can be curbed just enough to counter alot of the negative effects , ofcourse it keeps getting diagnosed willy-nilly and thrown to everyone who fidgets nowadays it seems.
              Being someone who is living with ADHD i am quite thankfull for the treatment , I more like to think of it as what could da-vinci of achived had he been properly helped with it.
              Given rather more focus to his various skills and allowed to fully develop the concepts , rather than having a new thought half way throug
      • Like any talented artist, Da Vinci surely had the ability to create a vivid image in his mind and hold on to it for the days or weeks necessary to bring it to reality. He also had the ability to invent new and unconventional approaches to problems. He would probably have been very good at pencil-and-paper puzzles like these.

        But would they have interested him?
    • David Tammet (from Kent, UK) was recently on a Discovery Channel special titled "Brain Man" -- he's much like Kim Peek (who he meets during the documentary), but he can clearly articulate what is happening inside his head... "how" he sees numbers and patterns. Speaking of puzzles, NPR had this year's crossword champion... if anyone wants to do 8 crosswords a day as their "training regimen" you might have a shot.

  • whew, those are some tough puzzles (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 21, 2005 @03:02AM (#12597432)

    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?

  • 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?
  • 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.
    • 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?
    • Google didn't start this competition, they just started sponsoring it a few years ago.

      There is a checkmark on the registration page that you check if you would like to receive notices of employment opportunities.
    • See this entry in the Google Weblog [blogspot.com] by Google employee Wei-Hwa Huang. It mentions that the best performers in the US Puzzle Championship go on to form part of the US team in the World Puzzle Championships; Wei-Hwa has been part of the US team [versatel.nl] for each of the past 12 years and won the whole World Championships in 1995, 1997, 1998 and 1999. It's fair to say that the conduit between impressive competitors in the championships and Google is pretty well-defined, to both parties' benefit - though, like you, I don

  • To the surprise of nobody... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Create an Account ( 841457 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @03:35AM (#12597542)
    ... 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.
    • I have an MBA... not honors... but got the first two okay.

      The trick is to figure out which values each square can NOT be. Once you start doing that, you find that from the ones left, you only get certain answers.

      On the one where you see the buildings, you have the whole row that said you could see 4... they could only go 1,2,3,4, going down. You now know that for the other 3 columns, none of the rows can contain another 1,2,3, or 4 (respectively).

      So, then look at the 2nd row down, and you have to be ab

    • Re:To the surprise of nobody... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ameoba ( 173803 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @04:29AM (#12597692)
      You're an MBA - most of us around here are suprised if you can read and write let alone click a mouse and download the test.

    • Re:To the surprise of nobody... (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The only thing these puzzles are good for is to figure out who's good at solving these kinds of puzzles.

      And an amazing puzzle solver doesn't strike me as the sort of person I'd want to write computer software alongside. As a secondary strength, sure, but not in the diva "I'm such a genius so I don't need comments, you wouldn't understand my code anyway" sort of way.

  • Solved! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Che Guevarra ( 85906 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @03:37AM (#12597548)
    No, just kidding. I got stuck on the practice puzzle when it asked for a password. I have my cluster working on that though.
  • 3 down, 2 to go for me.
    • Hey I have solved 1,2 and 5. Did you notice that Puzzle 5 had appeared in 2004 U.S. Puzzle Championship (Puzzle no.15) "Television...is something the Russians invented to destroy American education." - Erdos
  • 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.

    • How long? I thought this was very easy. Maybe that's why it's first?

      But the another numbers can't be put any way you want? Remember no repetition?

      But once you have the first 3 lines the rest is pretty easy.
    • NO! In the other places, you CANNOT put whatever you want. The puzzle explicitly states that no numbers are repeated in any row or column.

      You ARE correct in your listing of the three 'clue' rows/columns. But, if you look at what you have now, you see that for each remaining row or column, there are two blanks that can only be filled with numbers that aren't already in that row or column. For each, there is a right combination and a wrong one, which would result in a duplicate number for another row or

    • 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:

      4213
      1324
      2431
      3142

  • Finished (with all correct)... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Ichoran ( 106539 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @06:31AM (#12597950)
    ...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?

    • Re:Finished (with all correct)... (Score:4, Informative)

      by zerbot ( 882848 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @07:03AM (#12598018)
      Scissors are on the allowed materials list.

    • Re:Finished (with all correct)... (Score:4, Informative)

      by Fortran IV ( 737299 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @10:18AM (#12598671) Journal
      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!

      I competed myself last year; I submitted 8 correct answers and no wrong ones, finishing well out of the top 50%; I eventually solved 18 of the 25 puzzles, but only over the course of several days.

      I believe that the people who solve these in 2-1/2 hours are doing nearly all the work in their heads, whether it's a rolling block puzzle or a crossword, then simply scribbling down the entire solution at once. A fantastic memory--swift, accurate, and strongly visual--is a definite advantage in this competition (an advantage I don't have).

      More than a little mathematical background isn't unhelpful either. For one puzzle I did solve last year, #19 "Point Pairs", it's helpful to know more Pythagorean triplets than 3,4,5. I did it rather quickly (that is, in under an hour) but it was one of the 5 least solved puzzles last year.

      What little advice I can offer:

      • Have lots of sharpened pencils, scratch paper, and a good eraser waiting.
      • Go to the bathroom just before time for the test.
      • Print more than one copy of the test.
      • Don't wait for the last page to print before you start working on the first page.
      • If you're married or involved, get your SO to take the kids to the zoo for the afternoon, so you have peace and quiet to work. For the rest of you, lock the basement door and tell your parents not to knock for the next 2-1/2 hours.

    • 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.

      • For the first problem, the sum of each row and column is 10.

        I'm not saying you didn't solve it, but you can come up with that statement simply from the directions.

        They say each row/column has a 1,2,3,4. 1+2+3+4 = 10. The trick is knowing what order they go in!

  • Visual bias (Score:3, Interesting)

    by dyscant ( 787737 ) on Saturday May 21, 2005 @10:20AM (#12598686) Homepage
    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.
  • 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 respponsibl

  • Corral (Score:1)

    by esky ( 885874 )
    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...
  • This seems like a tough competition. Or maybe I'm just stupid?
    • Don't feel stupid. It's a very tough competition. The median score for Americans last year was 82 out of a possible 432 points, about 19%.

      But it's also sort of specialized to certain kinds of problem-solving ability and appallingly memory-intensive--there's simply not time to solve these problems on paper. I know some very bright people who'd be utterly bumfuzzled by this competition.

      But if you like these sorts of puzzles, it's still a ton of fun.

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