Shortlog - a log of everyday things

2012-04-14

I got up at early-o'-clock (approximately 06:40, or "two full hours before I normally wake up"), picked up Ankur, Annelise, and Josiah, and drove down to Stanford for this year's Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. The CPC wasn't being held this year at Berkeley, but that won't keep a team of serious puzzlers like ours from getting their puzzle fix.

We wound up packing an extraordinary amount of supplies. There's the obvious things: pencils, scratch paper, computer, and power supply. There's the not-obvious-the-first-time-but-obvious-if-you've-done-it-before: scissors, tape, colored pencils, a ruler, whiteboard markers that work, and a portable whiteboard. There's the we-like-being-nourished-while-thinking-this-hard: bananas, oranges, Clif bars, crackers, trail mix. There's the we're-serious-about-having-everything-we-might-benefit-from-having-on-hand: a projector, a 14-port power strip, an extra pair of laptops. And finally, there's the we-do-this-in-style: t-shirts from past puzzle competitions and a wizard hat. Ankur also had a pillow and a sleeping bag (unrelated - he needed to return them to a friend), but he left those in the car.

We settled into a snazzy conference room, and then another team dropped in saying they had reserved it for the day, so we moved to a different unoccupied one. Fortunately, Stanford's CS building is snazzy and has lots of awesome conference rooms. We wound up in a room with a giant table, in between a men's bathroom and a kitchen. I plopped my power stip in the middle, and we got to work.

I felt our teamwork was very solid overall. We played to our strengths - Annelise is great with word puzzles, Josiah does an amazing job of finding obscure things and can jump in to help on pretty much any puzzle, Ankur excels at figuring out answers with insufficient or mistaken information and notices patterns well, and I tend to be decent at throwing down extraction mechanics, know a pile of encodings, and hack together scripts. To top it off, we're all pretty good at catching each other's mistakes. :)

Puzzles that I had a hand in solving:

• Ameglian - a puzzle that looks like an HTTP 404 page, except that the actual error is 418 I'm a Teapot. A solo solve.
• Cows in Space - a constraint satisfaction puzzle. Once I found the two Ms and the A, my teammates suggested various theme-fitting words, and we found the right one after a couple guesses. After solutions were posted, Josiah quipped "Well, the left half of that picture looks familiar."
• Beverage Menu was one Josiah and I threw down in the first 5 minutes flat with about 50% of the data.
• I did the "Duck Konundrum", Don't Panic!, on the whiteboard.
• Hello Ground was a Silverlight puzzle where you had to keep 5 objects suspended in the air with a fan. After failing at the game for a while, I gave up on trying to beat the game the normal way and read the XAML in the executable's implementation. Presumably to defeat people attempting to extract the answer from the binary, the developers painted the answer with lines and shapes, rather than rendering text. No matter, I reverse-engineered how the Data field of <Path> works (I couldn't find a good reference online, and MonoDevelop kept crashing when I tried to let the IDE render it), and painted the Path by hand on scratch paper. I managed to inadvertently invert the Y axis in one of the drawings and wound up making a W into an M; Josiah noticed this and came up with the correct answer.
• I came up with the final extraction for Eat In or Take Away. I also made a mistake that threw all of us off for a bit longer than I'd like to admit.
• Carambola, the t-shirt puzzle, was actually one of the last puzzles we solved; we didn't figure it out until after the meta. Eventually, I had a breakthrough when I said "Star. Fruit. Where's APPLE?" out loud slowly. From there, the team made quick work of the rest of the puzzle together.
• Ankur did most of the work on Three Part Act, but I helped with transcription.
• I solo'd What Do You Get When You pretty quickly.
• I'm Hungry was a full-team effort. We made a bunch of transcription mistakes, but we managed to catch each other's errors. This puzzle made me feel really good about our teamwork.
• We got stuck at the final step of Two for WAY too long.
• The Honeycomb was this year's metapuzzle. As soon as round 2 unlocked, Ankur and Josiah figured out which hexes were which color. Later, Josiah and I spent some quality time with a transcribed set of bigrams, figuring out what hexes could go where. We finished the metapuzzle - about 10 minutes after a team from University of Michigan won the overall prize.

All told, we got second nationally, and first at Stanford, so we each got a $100 Best Buy gift card. This bodes well for Google Games (upcoming on the 28th). We also earned the distinction of being the only team to complete every puzzle during the competition.

After the brief award ceremony, we hung out on campus with a group of Ankur's friends. Ankur led us to several fruit trees, and picked lots of kumquats from the trees. Apparently Stanford has an online encyclopedia of the flowering plants on campus. After eating kumquats and oranges, we went to The Axe and Palm for dinner. The same building had lots of snazzy meeting rooms, so our team sat down and worked for a bit on our puzzle hunt. Annelise and Ankur focused on finalizing the t-shirt design, and Josiah and I played puzzle-doctor for a particularly broken puzzle. After toying with a decent number of options, we rewrote

And then, all of a sudden, it was 23:00, so I drove us back to Berkeley. I dropped Ankur at his residence, then joined Josiah and Annelise for a cup of tea and another hour of coding for our puzzlehunt website.

It was a good day, and I'm looking forward to hunting with that team again. :)