2012-05-20
Some pictures from Google Games (previously discussed here), courtesy of Hanah Kim:
My team! Our team all wore hats. Annelise has the red beret, I have my wizard
hat, Nima is in his Russian cap with earflaps, Josiah has his standard baseball
cap, and Ankur is in the background, but his fez can be seen on the table. You
might have noticed we're all wearing our Berkeley Mystery Hunt 2012 t-shirts -
the day before we ran that hunt. Organizing has it's privileges! :D
One of the events involved building as tall and wide a bridge as we could out
of whatever LEGOs were in the bag that was dropped on our table. Scoring was
(2* minimum distance between ends of the bridge) + (maximum height of the
structure). As a result, the optimal strategy was to have a low, narrow bridge
with a very tall spire at one end. I came up with a clever way to mount the
spire that allowed us to use the length of the pieces to generate height rather
than their height, which was fairly unusual among the structures we saw and
allowed construction of a much lighter tower. By the time we finished, the
spire was so tall and thin it swayed from the air currents in the room. It was
slightly unnerving, but survived the measuring process. We had the 3rd
highest-scoring bridge, which was better than I had expected.
This must have been during either the trivia round of the competition or the
puzzles round. I'm guessing that you'd see a laptop out if it were the puzzles
round, so I bet we're dividing-and-conquering trivia questions here.