Microsoft Iron Puzzler II
This past weekend, Los Jefes competed in Microsoft Iron Puzzler II. Unfortunately, there were only 5 teams competing this time, fewer than half as many as last time. We're hoping this isn't a trend, because we've had an awesome time in both of the IP's that we've done and we're looking forward to more! The best information we could gather was that some teams found the event fell too close to PH 11. Personally, I think a month is more than enough time to recover. :-)
On Friday night, Cyndy, Jeff P., Kevin, Nikhil, Steve and I gathered in our usual conference room for the authoring phase. This event's puzzle ingredients were monkey, chip, lead and star, with a set of puzzles revealing a 5th ingredient: orange. I had an existing paper puzzle idea that could incorporate the ingredients, so we went with that as our paper puzzle. Nikhil once again provided an awesome non-paper puzzle. The background music is Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton and I haven't been able to get it out of my head all day!
I'm honestly not sure how to characterize our third puzzle. I have to admit, I still love this puzzle, even though we were really disappointed that no teams solved it. We were brainstorming puzzle ideas and saw an image of Barrel of Monkeys where the monkeys came in red, green and blue. This led us to the idea of combining monkeys representing RGB colors with well-known movie scenes. Kevin had a clever scheme for the RGB colors to yield resistor colors that indexed the movie names. Cyndy mocked up Gone with the Wind with some particularly maniacal-looking monkeys from Publisher clip-art and Jeff suggested putting it all to the tune of Brass Monkey by the Beastie Boys. We encoded the message MUSIC MINUS RUM - as it turns out, a Brass Monkey is rum + vodka + orange juice, so SCREWDRIVER was our answer. Once we'd gotten that far, I'm sure everyone can understand that we had to make the monkeys dance... From what we gathered after the solving phase, the RGB to resistor colors step was too much of an unclued leap of faith for other teams and the dancing was an unintended data stream, which we should have identified in test solving if we hadn't all fallen in love with the dancing monkey puzzle and been utterly spoiled for test solving (our takeaway - next time, author in smaller groups!). Ah, but it still makes me laugh out loud every time I look at it...
Apparently, one team was short a puzzle and GC asked us to provide an extra puzzle since we'd mentioned we had two candidates for our final puzzle, so I threw in my Walk the Line puzzle. I'll admit I found it not truly satisfying that it used the same underlying encoding as our other paper puzzle, but I guess I was just noticing groups of five this week...
The solving period was brief but fun. Both this year and last year, I've been really impressed with the level of creativity for puzzles produced in such a brief timeframe. This time around, we did see more errors in puzzles - one in particular that allowed us to get to the very last step of the puzzle and have the right approach, but be unable to solve it - very annoying! Nonetheless, there were some very cool puzzles - I particularly enjoyed the cryptic crossword where puzzle ingredients sometimes occupied word intersections (although the use of Pb for lead did trip us up a bit). Other puzzles that stand out for me include a crossword embedded in a tree with types of monkeys as vertical answers and a puzzle with images representing letters encoded in 5 bits, which conveniently turned out to be very similar to a puzzle I made for Cyndy's spy-themed birthday hunt this summer. There was a cool backwards cryptogram entitled The DaVinci Code, which unfortunately had a particularly nasty final step that kept us from solving it. The Pringles puzzle (a container of different flavors of Pringles chips with various data written on them) produced by the winning team was also fun - well, fun for me anyway, because Nikhil and Cyndy did all the data munging and my contribution was just to get past the final step by noticing that the flavors of Pringles listed on the fake Pringles wrapper were in the form of a Braille cell.
In all, it was a fun weekend of puzzling. Too bad more teams didn't get to enjoy it!
On Friday night, Cyndy, Jeff P., Kevin, Nikhil, Steve and I gathered in our usual conference room for the authoring phase. This event's puzzle ingredients were monkey, chip, lead and star, with a set of puzzles revealing a 5th ingredient: orange. I had an existing paper puzzle idea that could incorporate the ingredients, so we went with that as our paper puzzle. Nikhil once again provided an awesome non-paper puzzle. The background music is Code Monkey by Jonathan Coulton and I haven't been able to get it out of my head all day!
I'm honestly not sure how to characterize our third puzzle. I have to admit, I still love this puzzle, even though we were really disappointed that no teams solved it. We were brainstorming puzzle ideas and saw an image of Barrel of Monkeys where the monkeys came in red, green and blue. This led us to the idea of combining monkeys representing RGB colors with well-known movie scenes. Kevin had a clever scheme for the RGB colors to yield resistor colors that indexed the movie names. Cyndy mocked up Gone with the Wind with some particularly maniacal-looking monkeys from Publisher clip-art and Jeff suggested putting it all to the tune of Brass Monkey by the Beastie Boys. We encoded the message MUSIC MINUS RUM - as it turns out, a Brass Monkey is rum + vodka + orange juice, so SCREWDRIVER was our answer. Once we'd gotten that far, I'm sure everyone can understand that we had to make the monkeys dance... From what we gathered after the solving phase, the RGB to resistor colors step was too much of an unclued leap of faith for other teams and the dancing was an unintended data stream, which we should have identified in test solving if we hadn't all fallen in love with the dancing monkey puzzle and been utterly spoiled for test solving (our takeaway - next time, author in smaller groups!). Ah, but it still makes me laugh out loud every time I look at it...
Apparently, one team was short a puzzle and GC asked us to provide an extra puzzle since we'd mentioned we had two candidates for our final puzzle, so I threw in my Walk the Line puzzle. I'll admit I found it not truly satisfying that it used the same underlying encoding as our other paper puzzle, but I guess I was just noticing groups of five this week...
The solving period was brief but fun. Both this year and last year, I've been really impressed with the level of creativity for puzzles produced in such a brief timeframe. This time around, we did see more errors in puzzles - one in particular that allowed us to get to the very last step of the puzzle and have the right approach, but be unable to solve it - very annoying! Nonetheless, there were some very cool puzzles - I particularly enjoyed the cryptic crossword where puzzle ingredients sometimes occupied word intersections (although the use of Pb for lead did trip us up a bit). Other puzzles that stand out for me include a crossword embedded in a tree with types of monkeys as vertical answers and a puzzle with images representing letters encoded in 5 bits, which conveniently turned out to be very similar to a puzzle I made for Cyndy's spy-themed birthday hunt this summer. There was a cool backwards cryptogram entitled The DaVinci Code, which unfortunately had a particularly nasty final step that kept us from solving it. The Pringles puzzle (a container of different flavors of Pringles chips with various data written on them) produced by the winning team was also fun - well, fun for me anyway, because Nikhil and Cyndy did all the data munging and my contribution was just to get past the final step by noticing that the flavors of Pringles listed on the fake Pringles wrapper were in the form of a Braille cell.
In all, it was a fun weekend of puzzling. Too bad more teams didn't get to enjoy it!
