Math + CS = 11

Today was RIT’s CS Puzzle hunt, which is similar to MIT’s Puzzle Hunt if you are fimilar with that except that we only have around 12 problems. If you are unfimilar with either puzzle hunt, it’s pretty much a series of puzzles which one must not only figure out the solution but also figure out what is needed to be done in order to solve the problem. For example, you might be given a list of numbers along with some “flavor text”, used to give hints as to what needs to be done, and you get to figure out what to do!

At times, this can be very frustrating because you’ll have no idea what to do or where to start. These types of puzzles require a lot of abstract thinking and a great deal of random knowledge. Unfortuatly, I don’t have much of the random knowledge but I’m ok at the abstract thinking part. I’m getting better at it as I do more and more of these types of puzzles. If you’ve never done these before, you’ll probably be like “what the fuck is this shit” most of the time because everything seems so random.

I only solved one problem out of the twelve but made a good deal of progress one some of the others. The one I solved was a “Bongard Problem.” I’ve never heard of it before but the idea is pretty simple. You are given a group of items which are similar in some way and a second group which are different. You are then given a third set of items and you need to determine which item in that set corrsponds to the set with the similarities. Here’s a cool link http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bongard_problem.

I was able to figure out 4 of the 8 solutions and it seems as though I would have to brute force the rest of the solutions. For each set, there were 3 possible answers and above each answer was a letter of the alphabet. I figured that the answer corrsponding with the letter and probably spelled out a word. I wrote a simple java program to print out all 81 possibilities for me and looked through to find a word that made sense. The funny part was that it was the very first combination tried, which means I’m pretty terrible at brute forcing things by hand :-/. Either way, I tried the answer on the problem and it said I was correct so we submitted that as the answer and it was correct! Woot!

I was also able to brute force another solution to a problem. It was the first one, which had to do with the names of Computer Science teachers. After reading the clue and looking at the layout of the puzzle, it was fairly obvious that it was a cryptic crossword puzzle, which suck. Not only do you have to complete a crossword puzzle, you also have to solve the clues for the puzzle. I was able to figure out 3 of the names that fit in and brute forced the letters for the other names that could fit into the spot. The answer didn’t show up at the very beginning like the last one did, but I did find it in my print out. Pretty neat think.

If you’re interested, you can find the puzzle here: http://www.cs.rit.edu/~zjb/hunt/. Also, http://www.collegepuzzlechallenge.com is a pretty good place to have fun with puzzles.