World Puzzle Championship: Day 3
Our man on the spot continues his culinary and brain-bending adventure.
Got up. Ate bagels. Did puzzles. Went to bed.
The World Puzzle Championship itself is a tournament taking place over two days, Friday 13th and Saturday 14th. There are eight rounds of puzzles, five on the Friday and three on the Saturday. Six of these are individual rounds. In the other two, the national teams work together and each produces one solution.
Individuals count up their scores from the six individual rounds, teams count all four individual scores from all six rounds and the scores from the team rounds. The top ten individual scorers will then advance to a grand final shoot-out on the Sunday.
Expectations among the British camp are hopeful rather than confident. We have spent a lot of time practising at home, but are still quite new to a lot of the problem formats that we expect to face. I (Chris) will be happy just not to be outclassed by the entire field. The others have higher hopes, possibly even extending into the top half. As a nation, we'll be interested in comparing our scores to those of the other first-time competitors and hoping to take a couple of scalps.
Wednesday's first round sees us take on a two-hour mixed bag of problems. Traditionally the first round has offered a gentle warm-up. We all hope for something welcoming to get us started. Even the "easy points" spot-the-difference puzzle has a diabolical twist - we need to identify the differences between a picture and its mirror image, and they're subtle changes. A personal disappointment for me was not being to crack a "balance the weighing scales" problem, coming from a type with which I am confident - this was a harder example than I had ever encountered before.
Likewise, we had prepared hard for a type of puzzle in which you identify which of a standard set of 28 dominoes is which, only for the numbers to be replaced by arrows which could point in one of a number of directions, making it much harder to work out which domino was which.
Happily, the other UK team members are pleased with their first round performances and we look forward to the second round, "Lunar Lockout". This is a brand new game in which you move robots in straight lines halted only by other robots blocking their path - a particularly cunning series of moves will see a particular robot moved to a particular square, which determines a correct answer.
Fortunes are mixed: six problems are posed and UK team members' fortunes vary from one solution to five. We later learn that the five is a rare achievement and the one is not too disgraceful.
Refuelled by a soup and salad lunch, we return to face the first team round, which requires us to roll long wooden blocks around a three-dimensional maze. The goal is to transport a particular wooden block from one place on the top level to another, but it can only be moved when there is a mid-level block immediately beneath to support it - and even the mid-level block is reluctant to move without the support of a ground-level block.
This is a new format to us all, but we are pleased to transport the top-level block nearly half-way to its destination and pick up some valuable points for the team. (We were sitting next to the French team, who managed to get the top-level block to its goal with just seconds to spare, to spark ecstatic celebration.)
Round four featured manipulative (mechanical) puzzles. Least said, soonest mended. We weren't the only team to display cumulative national incompetence upon this round. Even the person who would go on to win the contest could solve none of the sliding block puzzle, the railway track laying puzzle, the fiendishly twisted tile placement puzzle (oh, you're meant to place them in the tray at an angle?) and the 3-D object manipulation test.
This object manipulation problem tested your dexterity in assembling an intricate figure from a network of plastic nodes and struts. We had been warned to handle the pieces with care or our model might well collapse.
After sharing a laugh at our complete blank, we concluded with a series of problems based upon the "Battleships" deduction game: find the battleship, the destroyers, the cruisers and the submarines which have been hidden in a grid - no two ships touching one another, that sort of thing. The basic problem was one we were all familiar with, but (as ever!) these championships offered a succession of increasingly hard complications on the simple problem. One problem had the battleships placed diagonally; another saw them placed on a hexagonal grid.
Five rounds gone, three to go. The British team ended the first day quite satisfied with its fifteenth place out of twenty. We joined the hot favourite USA team at their table in the communal turkey dinner and they taught us some card games afterwards. In return, we showed them the seminal radio spoof parlour game "Mornington Crescent". Now there's one game at which we will always excel.
|
