Completely Puzzled

This weekend I was part of the Puzzled Puzzling Oxen, a team of four members competing in the Microsoft Puzzle Challenge. An annual event sponsored by Microsoft, the competition featured 21 difficult puzzles that were to be solved in the span of 12 hours; from noon to midnight. Our team had a decent showing for a rookie group, finishing 9 puzzles in the allotted time to finish in 55^th place among 170 teams from around the world. The top four teams were all from MIT, outranking Columbia, Cornell, Georgia Institute of Technology, and the Universities of Michigan, Southern California, Texas, and Toronto.

Barring sleep, I can’t remember the last time I did something for a consecutive 12 hours. There is a certain thrill in finding the correct answer after working on a problem for ten and a half hours. The puzzles have not yet been released on the internet but I’ll try to snag a scanned copy so you can try your hand at the real deal.