World Puzzle Championship: Day 1
The MSO's webmaster Chris Dickson reports from his spot on England's team at the WPC.
Wednesday 11th October was a day on which teams from all around the world travelled to the small urban city of Stamford in the US state of Connecticut in order to assemble for the ninth World Puzzle Championships. The championships have been running annually since their 1992 inception, having been held first in nearby New York and mostly in Europe ever since then, making this the first return to the United States.
This year's championship looks set to be the biggest and best yet, with representatives from over 25 countries and full national teams from at least 20. Truly this is a global event with representation from five continents: both North and South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania.
It's interesting to note that the vast majority of the national teams don't have English as their first language (the Japanese and Hungarian teams are particularly favoured to make a strong challenge to the defending champions from the USA); this restricts the selection of puzzles slightly to vocabulary-free, culture-free logic problems whose instructions can be translated into all the tongues of the world.
The puzzles themselves do not start until Friday, so Wednesday was intended as an icebreaking day for the teams to get to know one another; a short drinks party preceded a pleasant chicken dinner, notable for a vast slice of cheesecake for dessert.
Even though a large number of languages were spoken, many common interests quickly emerged: a large number of the competitors have a professional connection with computers, people are enthusiastic players of games and followers of sport and many people also take a keen interest in gambling. (The Finnish team were happy to report that their national football team had earned a draw with the English team; some of the Turks were celebrating their victory over Azerbaijan.)
Many of the teams here are making their first appearances at the WPC. We have representatives from Australia for the first time, who are united in youth, sense of humour and appearance (a team T-shirt with a national flag, plus the famous national cork-bearing hats!). The UK sent a team once before to an early WPC, but our appearance is completely unconnected with it.
Mr. Who?
While the chat was lively and convivial, the puzzles in the days ahead weighed heavily on people's minds. We already know what the styles of puzzles are which will face us; they are best described as devious twists on familiar styles.
Early warm-up rounds feature word searches and crosswords where the twist is that not all the words listed appear in the grid, complicated balancing acts and all manners of grid dissection; later rounds will see us stacking, sorting, reshaping and producing physical objects around to solve tricky tasks.
I am particularly looking forward to Saturday's Round Six, a challenge where the teams must work together to solve a dozen puzzles within two and a half hours. The numerical answers from each of the twelve will then give you the clues you need to solve a thirteenth puzzle, which is to correctly construct a (wait for it ...) Mr. Potato Head model.
I'm sure that there's going to be more to it than that, somehow, especially as we aren't going to be told what one of the twelve puzzles is - we need to figure out both question and answer for ourselves from the material we're given to solve the other twelve.
Sounds intriguing, as do all of the other challenges we face. It's going to be a fascinating, though very probably frustrating, week!
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