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Puzzle Games (Games) Entertainment Games

Google-Sponsored 2004 US Puzzle Championship 115

Posted by simoniker from the very-puzzling dept.
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."
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Google-Sponsored 2004 US Puzzle Championship More

Google-Sponsored 2004 US Puzzle Championship

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  • Hmmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by Grrr ( 16449 ) <cgrrrNO@SPAMgrrr.net> on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:30PM (#9422836) Homepage Journal
    You'll be away from your internet connection?
    Away...
    uh...

    I just don't get it.

    <grrr>
    • I think he means, you know, like when you avoid walking by a woman fearing that she might bite you or try to talk to you or something.

      Guess he's scared of the Internet; he probably thinks it's going to laugh at his looks and make fun of his hobbies.

      Not that it ever happened to me, just saying, just saying...

  • /. effect (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:31PM (#9422846)
    The first puzzle would be how to avoid getting slashdotted.
    • Puzzle: Page cannot be displayed.

      I won, I won !! woohooo !!

    • Re:/. effect (Score:3, Funny)

      by mothz ( 788133 )
      Damn! The one time I actually want to RTFA!

    • Re:/. effect (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:02PM (#9423112)
      The first puzzle would be how to avoid getting slashdotted.
      That one is easy: First put the PDF download URL on a rotating link. Then for each visitor check to see if the referrer is slashdot.org, if not offer the download URL, if so then redirect these users to a random URL within the slashdot archives. In the time it takes someone to not be an asshole and post a mirror you will have made it over the hump and in the process burned a bit of the slashdot site bandwidth in return for the "favor" they granted you...

      I am really surprised that this is not offered as a standard option on Apache.
    • That pretty much happened (at least to me) during last years contest.

      There was a time penalty if you submitted your answers after the deadline. I tried submitting mine with about 3-4 minutes to spare, and I got nothing on the connection for at least 10 minutes. Unfortunatly, they didn't give you a breakdown per individual on your scoring, so I don't know if I had a penalty or not.

      I still did OK, around 350th place or so. I'm hoping they publish individual results this time.

  • Here's the test... (Score:3, Funny)

    by gpinzone ( 531794 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:31PM (#9422854) Homepage Journal
    Get the PDF file containing the instructions while the server has been slashdotted. Now that's a challenge!

  • Make sure you read the instructions! (Score:5, Funny)

    by riptide_dot ( 759229 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:32PM (#9422857)
    For the real test, you should print and read the Preview Instructions well in advance of the actual test. The Preview Instructions may include special last-minute instructions that will not appear elsewhere.

    ...get...instructions...well...in...advance...but. ..must...get...last...minute...instructions...

    Okay I'm out. My brain already hurts...

  • They better get *better* servers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:32PM (#9422860) Homepage Journal
    Seriously. Not even 5 minutes up, and the site's melting. If they plan to have an audience in addition to the competitors, they better beef up their machines/connection.

    Gateway Timeout
    The following error occurred:

    A gateway timeout occurred. The server is unreachable. Retry the request. (GATEWAY_TIMEOUT)
    Please contact the administrator.

  • Sounds fun . . . (Score:5, Informative)

    by randyest ( 589159 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:35PM (#9422877) Homepage
    . . . but the practice test page is down (./'ed already?) so here's a copy [archive.org] courtesy of the wayback machine [archive.org] (the last link is an index to several versions of that practice page.)

    Good luck all.

  • An excerpt. (Score:5, Funny)

    by sammy baby ( 14909 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:37PM (#9422896) Journal
    An excerpt from the practice test:
    1. If 200,000 Slashdot geeks click a link to a website in a span of five minutes, to request a 1 meg PDF file from over your crappy T1, what will the average ratio of geek to T1 channels be over a minute? Assume a standard 24 channels per T1, and that the Slashdot audience will rabidly click and re-click the link until a successful connection is made.

  • Hope springs eternal... (Score:5, Funny)

    by MindNumbingOblivion ( 668443 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:37PM (#9422903)
    And when I discovered they weren't talking about tetris, the white dove of hope came crashing back to earth in a fiery ball of feathers.

    At least I get some roasted avian out of the deal...

  • If you ever... (Score:5, Informative)

    by msl521 ( 468252 ) * <m-liebman@north w e s t e r n.edu> on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:40PM (#9422926) Homepage Journal
    > this past weekend, Will Shortz mentioned

    If you ever have the chance to hear Will Shortz speak in person, it is well worth it. If you have an interest in word puzzles, cross or otherwise, he is very interesting. Plus, he will usually play a game with the audience for a good amount of time.

  • I wonder... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by manduwok ( 610836 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:50PM (#9423015)
    Suppose you were elected to the finals. Do they pay any flight/room costs? (Due to the recent Slashdotting, I can't RTFA and answer my own question.)
    • Do they pay any flight/room costs?

      Figuring this out is part of the test, I guess you wont be going.

    • I don't think so.

      I placed 5th in the Canadian qualifier. Two and a half weeks before the competition in Arnhem, I got an e-mail asking me if I wanted to join the team, as other members of the team, including alternates, had dropped out.

      I rushed through my passport application. I got the time off work, luckily. But I wasn't able to find a reasonably-priced plan fare with notice that short, so I had to decline. On sale, one can get round trip from Vancouver to Amsterdam for six or seven hundred bucks Canadi
  • Q. How do you recover a Windows Server from a Slashdot beating?

  • Questions... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mz6 ( 741941 ) * on Monday June 14, 2004 @03:53PM (#9423035) Journal
    I managed to get a copy of the PDF file.. I have no way to mirror it and Google's cache isn't working of it so here's what I could grab. Anyways.. if you want to see the questions (minus pictures..)

    1. Battleships - 5 points; 5 point bonus
    Locate the position of the 10-ship fleet in the grid. The fleet is shown to the right of the grid: one 4-unit battleship, two 3-unit cruisers, three 2-unit destroyers, and four 1-unit submarines. Each segment of a ship occupies a single cell. Ships are oriented either horizontally or vertically, and they do not touch each other, not even diagonally. The numbers on the right and bottom edges of the grid reveal the total number of ship segments that appear in each respective row or column. (For solving purposes, ignore the letters above and the numbers left of the grid.)

    2. Pentomino Division - 5 points
    Divide each of the six shapes into two pieces so that each of the 12 Pentominoes (shown at right) is used exactly once. The Pentominoes can be rotated and/or reflected. Answer: Enter the letters pairs corresponding to each of the six original shapes.

    3. Dutch Segway - 5 points
    Which of the numbered drawings is an exact mirror image of the drawing in the upper left?

    4. Corral - 20 points; 5 point bonus
    Draw a single closed loop along the grid lines so that all the numbered squares are inside the loop. Additionally, each number equals the count of interior squares that are directly in line (horizontally or vertically) with that number's square, including the square itself. In the example, the square containing the 4 is directly in line with two squares above it and one square to its right. Including the square itself, the total count is four.

    5. Rotator Mosaic - 20 points
    Divide the grid (along the grid lines) into exactly 10 symmetric pieces (each appearing unchanged if rotated 180, including its shape and the pattern of any white or black disks).

    6. A to Z Crisscross - 25 points; 5 point bonus
    Place the 19 words into the grid in crisscross style (words appear either across or down, and all words formed in the grid appear in the word list), so that there are exactly 26 word intersections--each in one of the highlighted squares. Additionally, each of the letters from A to Z appears exactly once in the highlighted squares.

    • Last year... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jeblucas ( 560748 ) <[jeblucas] [at] [gmail.com]> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:12PM (#9423206) Homepage Journal
      They had a puzzle similar to the mirror image one, except it asked which was exactly the same. You could easily identify mismatches by placing the images side-by-side and "Magic Eye"'ing them, as you would for a stereogram. Images that are exactly the same will be fine, but images that differ even slightly will have blurry smudges when observed this way. It's like a quick 2-D diff. I told them this was a flaw and I'm glad to see them change the puzzle.

  • Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

    by merlin_jim ( 302773 ) <{James.McCracken} {at} {stratapult.com}> on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:03PM (#9423121)
    I used to try doing this kind of thing, back when I thought that MENSA was a good organization to try to belong to.

    Looking at the practice test, I realize that I don't really like word puzzles. It's that last criss cross puzzle that got me. There's no general solution to word puzzles; you just arbitrarily try answers till you get it. And the final solution doesn't have any beauty.

    Take the rotator puzzle. This is an interesting puzzle, and the algorithm to find the final solution may be very interesting indeed, even applicable in video processing and the like...

    But don't include NP complete problems in your puzzle. I don't like them. The algorithm and method of solving isn't interesting or insightful, it's just boring and tedious.
    • Mensa can be a good organization to belong to. Even if you don't feel like associating with people, or getting involved in any way whatsoever, you get a discount on car insurance, amongst many others. Mensa partners with lots of different organizations.

      Being a member of Mensa has saved me more than $300 over the past three years (cost of being a member for 3 years is around $115 or so), so from a strictly economical standpoint, it pays off -- the publications and interaction are just icing on the cake.

      • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Informative)

        by mhesseltine ( 541806 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:02PM (#9424101) Homepage Journal
        Mensa can be a good organization to belong to. Even if you don't feel like associating with people, or getting involved in any way whatsoever, you get a discount on car insurance, amongst many others. Mensa partners with lots of different organizations.

        Being a member of Mensa has saved me more than $300 over the past three years (cost of being a member for 3 years is around $115 or so), so from a strictly economical standpoint, it pays off -- the publications and interaction are just icing on the cake.

        You know, you could have just gone to Geico [geico.com] and saved money on your car insurance.

    • Re:Hmmm (Score:4, Insightful)

      by iabervon ( 1971 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @06:30PM (#9424355) Homepage Journal
      Many problems which are, in general, NP complete are solvable in polynomial time with some extra information (by definition, all of them are with some sort of information); given some of the helpful information, the problem can be interesting and reasonable.

      For that matter, many classes of NP complete problems have good heuristics which will solve many of the cases (but not the cases built from other NP-complete problems). You can get a good rate of success on random or common problems with an algorithm which terminates in polynomial time, having found the correct solution 75% of the time and given up the other 25%, while never either running long or giving an incorrect answer.
    • The word problem can be solved through straighforward deductive logic. There's no need to backtrack more than a single step. Figuring that sort of thing out is probably a key step in finishing in time.
  • Why did this site melt under slashdotting in five minutes? From Netcraft:

    Windows 2000 Microsoft-IIS/5.0 14-Jun-2004 199.165.204.120 Micro Serve
    Hopefully they solve that one before the real contest starts.
  • This practice puzzle is a typical example of what you might expect to see at the Championship. There are other types of puzzles in the test, so if you don't score well on this don't lose all hope!

    The following might sound easy but it's harder than it sounds. The hardest puzzles are always the ones with the fewest rules!

    PRACTICE PUZZLE

    Join the dots with a line. There are only four rules:

    1. Only straight lines are to be used (no curves, bends or corners)
    2. These straight lines must start and end at a dot
    3. You may only go through a dot one time
    4. You may NOT intersect lines
    5. You may NOT lift the pen from the paper during the process of solving the puzzle once you have laid it on the paper

    Are you ready?

    Here's the puzzle:

    . .

    (NOTE: If you run out of ink once you start the puzzle you will be disqualified)

    (NOTE 2: this is a 2-dimensional puzzle. Any attempts to solve this puzzle in three-dimensional space will result in disqualification.)

    Scoring:

    less than 3 minutes - Incredible! We recommend you take part in the competition. May we commend your parent's rearing skills!

    3-6 minutes - Pretty good. If your skills in other types of puzzles are at this level or higher, we recommend signing up! You might have been deficient in some nutrients as a child.

    6-12 minutes - Decent. If this type of puzzle is not your forté and you are better at others you might still have a chance.

    12-20 minutes - Poor. Sorry, but your dot-connecting skills are not up to par with our competition. This is probably because you were dropped on your head as a baby.

    Over 20 minutes - Abysmal. Your parents must have a postgraduate degree in any social sciences subject. Thus is life.

  • Start Test When the test begins, click HERE to get the test password. For the practice test, you may do this immediately.

    Note: please ensure in advance that your browser can refresh this page properly. We believe that many AOL browsers, and perhaps others, do not work instantaneously. Otherwise, you may not notice when the password page is updated.

    Uhh, so they put up a pdf [puzzles.com]... and it's password protected... and you can only see the preview... until they give you the password (released on their site at

    • The password is "world".. without the quotes of course.
      • Yes, I know, but if you read the site, they make it seem like the real test is embedded in that pdf, and they're going to release the password to unlock all of it, not just the practice or instruction sections...
        • You misunderstand. The point of the practice test is for participants to ensure that they have the correct technology in place to play: A working Acrobat reader which can handle the encryption method used, and which can print the puzzles.

          Also, the point of the password protection is so that participants can download the actual puzzle file up to 1 day in advance of the test, but not read it until the test officially begins and the password for the real file is posted. (And it will be more complex than "worl

  • The Ultimate Google Puzzle Game (Score:3, Funny)

    by BRock97 ( 17460 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:12PM (#9423210) Homepage
    Google + Boggle =

    Boogle! Fun for the entire family! Do a hidden word search on each Google query!

  • Just to save you one /.ed page (Score:3, Informative)

    by elhaf ( 755704 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:13PM (#9423215) Homepage
    The password is world.

  • It's not Will Shortz... (Score:5, Funny)

    by kzinti ( 9651 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:19PM (#9423258) Homepage Journal
    ...it's Puzzlemaster Will Shortz. Please show proper respect, or we will send a (24-Down) to (10-Across) out your porch light.

  • Compete Against Wei-Hwa? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 14, 2004 @04:27PM (#9423322)
    I wonder if the US's best puzzler, Wei-Hwa Huang, will compete in the online tournament. He won the world championships a couple of years ago and finished second last year. I went to college [caltech.edu] with this guys and he was a dweeb even by Techer standards. All freshmen go to an orientation camp on Catalina Island and every year's there's a "talent show." Wei-Hwa entered the talent show and showed how he could solve a Rubik's Cube after only glancing at it once. He would quickly look at the cube, then walk around the room trying to be funny while he solved it without looking at it again. Each joke was followed by what can only be described as a very uncomfortable silence... I think Wei-Hwa works for Google now, an interesting coincidence?
  • tell the world what is the code for Google's search engine functionality. :)
  • It's in the middle of f'n nowhere and you want me to go there to solve puzzles? What am I supposed to do for fun, cross the border and pick me up some romanian women???......

    sign me up...

    • Re:It's in CROATIA!!! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      WTF are you talking about!? Croatia is freaking amazing. It has islands riveled only by Greece and Turkey, good local beer, greenish/blue clear water, and it's cheap as hell. You can eat a steak dinner for about $5 US dollars. Not to mention the locals like to party (Sibenik).

      "What am I supposed to do for fun, cross the border and pick me up some romanian women???......"

      You have no idea, don't slam a country you know nothing about. Croatia is where all the Europeans go for vacation because it is awes
    • It's in the middle of f'n nowhere and you want me to go there to solve puzzles?

      Middle of nowhere? Score: -1, ignoramus.

      Croatia is just north of Italy, south of Austria (which is a whole different country than Australia, in case you were wondering), actually pretty much in the center of Europe. City of Opatija is less than 100 miles away from Venice (a city in Italy, not a beach in the US).

      What am I supposed to do for fun, cross the border and pick me up some romanian women???......

      Opatija is actually

  • Opt-Huh? (Score:3, Funny)

    by droleary ( 47999 ) on Monday June 14, 2004 @05:36PM (#9423867) Homepage

    Oh, you have to love the opt-in selection on the registration page:

    Click here if you would like to be contacted by Google regarding employment opportunities and other promotions.

    Pay me $100k to work for them or spam me to decrease my mortgage payment while I increase my penis size; it's all the same, right? Why, Google, why?

  • "Prizes will be awards to the top US contestants."

    That must be the cheapest way to find out who are the best puzzle players in the world.

    Luckly, my flag doesn't have red stripes.
  • Ok, I tried my hand at the puzzles last year. Finished somewhere in the top 50, not bad.

    HOWEVER, the entire thing was spoiled by a terrible server. They tell you to go to a site at precisely 11:00 am to get a password for a PDF, but guess what, the server isn't responding. I refresh and refresh until I give up and call the toll help line. They just say "gee, we're having some issues."

    15 minutes later I get the page to load. That's 15 minutes less that I had to work on the test. I rationalized it, th
    • The thing is, it *did* matter, because it wasn't merely used for the US entries, but also for the Canadian entries, which were much closer.

      And because so many of the top-ranked Canadians couldn't go, they had to drop down as far as #6 or #7 on the list, too. That time would have been vital in determining who went.

  • Solution to 1 [lmuscle.com]

    Solution to 2 [lmuscle.com]

    Solution to 3

    1. the number of ice drops behind his back skate
    2. the right-foot skate blade
    3. the tassles at the end of the scarf are missing
    4. correct
    5. the number of lines on the closer end of the scarf
    6. the direction of the blades on the windmill
    7. the socks

    Solution to 4 [lmuscle.com]

    Solution to 5 [lmuscle.com]

    Solution to 6 - any takers?

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