{"id":5,"date":"2008-03-30T10:34:32","date_gmt":"2008-03-30T17:34:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/?p=5"},"modified":"2008-03-30T10:34:32","modified_gmt":"2008-03-30T17:34:32","slug":"google-talk-puzzle-competition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/google-talk-puzzle-competition\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Talk \/ Puzzle Competition"},"content":{"rendered":"

Google did a talk and puzzle competition at Adelaide Uni on Friday.<\/p>\n

My team did okay for a while, but fell behind at the end: we were 5th out of about 12 teams.<\/p>\n

Here are a few tips for those of you out there who go to one of these in the future:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Organise a group.<\/strong>\u00c2\u00a0They strongly suggested 5 person teams. You get 6 problems 2 hours to solve them. In addition, one of the questions was highly parallelisable. You can gather with others in the room, but it’s not as smooth.<\/li>\n
  2. Look through all the questions before starting.<\/strong> You get bonus points for being the first to answer a question correctly. We just went through the questions in sequence, and each volunteered for questions we thought we could do fastest. We could have played the system by seeing which puzzles could be brute forced by having more than one person work on them at once, and concentrated on them first. Also, given that the groups were 5 people with 6 questions, question 6 was usually left until last, and so could have been easy pickings for bonus points.<\/li>\n
  3. Don’t be afraid to get clues. <\/strong>There are 2 clues per puzzle, each costing 25 points: the first was just a basic hint as to how to solve that kind of puzzle. The second hint was for people who had done a lot of the working out, but who had not had the flash of insight needed to solve it. I was doing the logic puzzle, and hit a brick wall at one point. I agonised for ages, then went for the first clue. It was just a basic hint as to how to solve logic puzzles, and so didn’t help me at all. Clue 2 pointed out a subtle point spread among several statements in the logic puzzle setup, and with this one I got a solution in a couple of minutes. Ideally, I would have gone for a clue earlier and only asked for the second one, then helped out with another one of the puzzles. The 25 points I wasted cost us at least one place in the rankings.<\/li>\n
  4. Get some sleep, coffee and puzzles.<\/strong> It’s more fun when you’re rested and alert! Next time this comes around, I’ll also spend some time in the week before doing other puzzles and challenges to get me in the right mindset.\u00c2\u00a0<\/li>\n
  5. Look for the twist.<\/strong> These are done by smart people in a playful mood, so puns and subtle hints abound. What is difficult or different about this problem that might also provide the insight into a solution? What might be a counter-intuitive leap or contrarian process that could get the answer? How could you re-express the information so that patterns would be more obvious.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    That said, it was actually a lot of fun. Get a few friends with the right mindset, and you’ll enjoy yourself immensely. I’m going to plan ahead next year!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Google did a talk and puzzle competition at Adelaide Uni on Friday. My team did okay for a while, but fell behind at the end: we were 5th out of about 12 teams. Here are a few tips for those of you out there who go to one of these in the future: Organise a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p715w6-5","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/luketoop.com\/epiphanies\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}