Puzzle Solvers

Seniors Chris Hill, Ryan Galginaitis, David Forsythe and Rob Kiefer spent 12 straight hours last week cooped up in a room, picking out patterns, codes, and number sequences.

But they’re not a bunch of nerds, insisted Forsythe, a computer science major.

“We’re not on our computers all the time, writing code and all that,” he said.

The foursome, who call themselves “Battletoads Part Deux,” after the notoriously difficult Nintendo game, placed 28th out of 413 teams and first at the university in this year’s College Puzzle Challenge — an annual competition sponsored by Microsoft in which college teams are charged with solving dozens of puzzles online in a race to the finish.

“It’s challenging, but the 12 hours flew by, surprisingly,” said Galginaitis, an economics major “There are a lot of logic and lateral thinking-type puzzles. technical-based, like computer science-type questions. It’s almost hard to describe without just looking at a puzzle.”

Galginaitis is the most recent addition to the team, which had its first experience with the competition last year — an attempt that did not end well.

“Last year we got destroyed, but this year we were pretty determined to beat the crap out of everybody else,” Forsythe said.  “Last year it was just for fun, this year it was kind of — there was more to it because we’re all seniors about to leave school; it was our last shot at it.”

Galginaitis said familiarity with the puzzles’ common themes and tricks, and a better sense of how to tackle them, led them to their top-50 spot, while Kiefer, a computer science major, said it was all about teamwork.

“It’s just always keeping your mind open to any meaning that a word could have, even as obscure as it might be,” Galginaitis said.

“I think we just got better at working together,” Kiefer added. “Last year we tried to tackle puzzles by ourselves, each person would take their own puzzle and try to solve it. This year, there was a lot of group work.”

One such puzzle was a grid of movie posters the team realized all included numbers. From film titles such as 10 Things I Hate About You, they pinpointed the Fibonacci sequence, a series of prime numbers, and five other famous sequences. They then wrote the names in a column, and read their first letters vertically. The answer was a single word: “perfect.”
Why do all this painstaking work?

“It’s just for fun,” Kiefer said.

Each group member won a software package consisting of Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007 and Windows 7 Ultimate, but Hill said the long-awaited victory is also a plus.

“We absolutely lost it because — it was a nail-biter at the end,” said Hill, who is also a computer science major. “When we submitted one of our last answers, we found out another team at our school was in first place here by two or three minutes, and we were heartbroken.”

Instead of working on the last few puzzles, Hill said, they focused on the competition’s meta-puzzle, in which the answers from previous puzzles act as clues. Solving this pushed them to first place out of the 13 teams from this university and 28th in the overall competition.

“[We were] just screaming, going out the building, running downstairs — it was amazing,” he said.

“Since we got 28th, it means we beat a bunch of MIT teams, a bunch of Stanford teams, and obviously those schools, they come in with like 50 teams of just super-geniuses,” Forsythe added. “It’s good to know we can stack up with a bunch of them.”

aisaacs at umdbk dot com