World Puzzle Championship: Day 2
The MSO's webmaster Chris Dickson reports from his spot on England's team at the WPC.
Thursday here at the Marriott Stamford hotel saw the teams get to know one another rather better by a series of group tours to the Big Apple - New York City - a 45-minute train ride away. A choice of itineraries was on offer, the most popular one proving to be a tour of the financial district, taking in both Wall Street and the World Trade Center.
A fine view of the Statue of Liberty was also had from Battery Park, well within convenient walking distance and an absolute pleasure in the excellent walking conditions: a near-cloudless sky and a summery 20 degrees Celsius.
Most of the socialising took place at the evening party, which took place at the No Idea? bar, an authentic and popular drinking-house deep in the suburbs of Manhattan. Most of the Anglophones tended to congregate together to swap stories.
The Australian team all work for a magazine publisher on a newsstand puzzle magazine; the Indian team took the same selection procedure as we did and picked the best four entrants out of 192 starters. (For comparison, even the vastly experienced and favoured USA team only had something like 134 trying out. We didn't reveal that the British team took the best four from six).
Many of the entrants from around the world have a professional interest in the World Wide Web, too. Ukraine have sent Serhiy Grabarchuk, part of the team who work on http://www.puzzles.com, the most logical site on the Internet for a puzzle portal. (Incidentally, www.puzzles.com is sponsored by Binary Arts, a manufacturer of fine hand-held puzzles such as the intriguing robot-moving spatial awareness test "Lunar Lockout", which will be the subject of one of the rounds of the contest.)
Furthermore, the UK team have drafted in Peter Ritmeester as captain, general secretary of the World Puzzle Federation; Peter's day job is running www.pzzl.com, a software company that makes puzzle software for other web sites. Also in attendance was Ed Pegg Jr., proprietor of the justly very famous www.mathpuzzle.com - one of the most interesting and frequently-updated sites of them all.
I also had the pleasure of getting to meet and chat with Wei-Hwa Huang, the four-time (and defending) World Puzzle Champion. Wei-Hwa makes for convivial and charming company, and I'm not just saying that because he claimed to visit this web site from time to time!
We noticed that tomorrow was a particularly haunting day to start the World Puzzle Championships: Friday 13th October in the year 2000. To make matters better still, there's a new moon. Consequently, we are all braced for the supernatural. More tomorrow unless we get spooked.
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