World Puzzle Championship: Day 5
Our man on the spot covers a thrilling final and a final meal.
The British team enjoyed a lazy Sunday morning without the pressures of having to perform at the top of our game one more time which were heaped upon the top ten finishers from the day before - the contenders for the overall crown had one more large obstacle in their way.
This Grand Final round had an intriguing format designed to tie up the loose ends and provide a dramatic, exciting conclusion to the contest. Each of the ten remaining contestants faced the same eight problems to be solved correctly as quickly as possible.
The tenth-place finisher from the weekend, Petr Nepovim, would be allowed 30 minutes to do this and those who had finished ahead of him would be allowed more time to do this, proportionate to their scores - hence Miklos Mocsy, who had finished ninth, got around an extra minute and a half and so on up to second-placed Niels Roest, allowed nearly 14 minutes more.
Wei-Hwa Huang had finished with 1230 points from the weekend compared to Niels' 983 and Petr's 672 - a vast margin - and this meant that he had very nearly 55 minutes to complete the challenge!
Given these handicapped time allowances, the start was staggered so that all contestants would run out of time at the same point. This meant that Wei-Hwa started on his own, then a very long eleven minutes later Niels Roest was let upon the same puzzles, then a relative rush of new contestants starting every minute or two through to tenth place. Whoever submitted a completely correct set of answers first would be declared the World Puzzle Champion for the year 2000.
The eight puzzles were more tests of speed than deep thought. One tested observation in a mirror-image identity parade, another tested route-planning skills around the highways of the state. Others still tested 2-D and 3-D visualisation and drew upon ideas introduced earlier in the weekend such as the "Lunar Lockout" game.
The killer problem of the eight was a sequence of eighteen cartoon drawings which had to be placed into chronological order so to make up a humorous short comic strip about the struggles of a passenger in a train having difficulty with some window blinds - one small slip here in the order would render the solution incorrect.
This was great fun to spectate. The contestants all worked on their own, wearing headphones to isolate them from potential assistance or distraction from the audience, while the audience could test out their own abilities on the same puzzles that the cream of the crop also faced. We also were informed when the contestants submitted answers to the various puzzles in order to get a sense of progression. It was clear that Wei-Hwa had submitted answers to all eight with about twenty-five minutes remaining on the clock, when others were still struggling to get to grips with them.
Still Wei-Hwa stared at the puzzles, checking his answers again and again, as some of the other front runners managed to devise solutions rather less quickly. Ulrich Voigt managed to get his final solution in with a little over four minutes to spare. The rest were struggling for third and fourth place, largely unsure of which of the six quadrillion possible answers to the comic strip to submit. It was looking like we had a clear winner and a clear second place.
However, with just two minutes to go, Wei-Hwa changed his answers to two of the questions, the one about planning a route around the state and the "Lunar Lockout" puzzle thought by many to be the easiest one set all weekend.
This set the audience buzzing. Why had he made the changes? Surely he hadn't managed to misinterpret the instructions? Surely he hadn't submitted the wrong answers?
Time expired, to an appreciative round of applause from the spectators, while we all waited to find out just how many correct answers each contestant had submitted. Several rounds of marking, checking and cross-checking then followed and WPC Director Will Shortz brought the overall results of this play-off to the house microphone.
Miklos Mocsy of Hungary was the big winner due to this play-off format. He had entered the round in ninth place, but managed to correctly solve six of the eight questions in a fast time which gained him considerable ground and a fifth-place finish.
Fourth was the Czech Republic's Robert Babilon, considered to be one of the favourites by many. In third place, with seven correct answers, was Niels Roest from the Netherlands; Niels had only submitted the seven, to put him ahead of the pack scoring six but behind the two leaders.
The crowd were stunned to find that Wei-Hwa's late changes had demoted him to second place behind Ulrich Voigt of Germany; the two had both got all eight questions correct, but Ulrich submitted his eighth correct solution much earlier to win the tie-breaker and win the individual World Puzzle Championship to a standing ovation.
We never got to find out why Wei-Hwa changed his answers at the last minute. Certainly he was right to do so; eight correct answers submitted late will always outperform six or seven correct answers submitted early.
However, when he had originally submitted answers so quickly, nobody could understand what had caused him to delay another twenty minutes and more before making changes to his solutions - and whether or not he had been spending those minutes internally doubting his first submissions, going over the techniques again and again in his head. Maybe we will never know.
I suspect that this play-off format will come into question over the coming weeks and months. Wei-Hwa fairly blew the rest of the field away over the course of eight long rounds of puzzles in the first two days, so it seems to be a little harsh to take his victory away from him due to what happened in a final hour of competition.
It is a measure of the margin of his victory that if you compose a fictional "best of the rest" competitor who matches the best performance in each individual round apart from Wei-Hwa's own, Wei-Hwa still beats the field by a margin of over a hundred points. On the other hand, he clearly was much slower than some of his closest rivals in the play-off - it may well be that he only answered six questions correctly in the first fifty-two minutes he had whereas Ulrich solved all eight in under forty-five.
I hope that this does not give the impression that I feel that Ulrich's performance was anything less than brilliant - the British team working together found it hard to solve more than five or six of the questions in the same time as the top contestants on their own cracked all eight.
Certainly he was the best performer in the play-off and a worthy World Champion as a result. If you consider the result of all 100+ problems set over the three days rather than the eight in the play-off, though, it's clear who has achieved more. In a sense, they're both champions.
There was no doubt, though, as to the result of the contest between national teams, fought with as much passion and intensity as the individual contest. The USA team put a large gap between themselves and lower competitors to retain the Puzzle Star trophy for another year. Netherlands were a clear second place and Germany pipped Hungary and the very impressive newcomers of France to take the bronze medals.
Click here for the quick results. Official results for the WPC.
Click here for Ed Pegg Jr.'s write-up of the WPC 2000.
After the excitement of the play-offs, we wound down as a group by taking an excursion to the nearby Katonah Museum of Art where a new exhibition was opening, focusing on the art and the craft of the puzzle. One of the two curators had specialised on wonderfully intricate jigsaw puzzles throughout the ages; the other curator displayed the highlights of his collection of 27,000 mechanical puzzles.
Truly it was an awesome and awe-inspiring sight. There were puzzles which you had to put together, puzzles which you had to take apart, puzzles which tested your dexterity, puzzles where you had to make patterns and puzzles where you just wondered how on earth a particularly impossible, fiendish-looking object had been fabricated.
One of the most popular attractions was a collection of drinking-vessels with holes in such that anybody trying to drink out of them in the normal way would spill their drink far before any of it would touch their lips. Only by deducing the right way to hold the vessel, where to place your hands and which holes to cover with your fingers could you get a drink at all. These have existed for over a thousand years as a practical joke at taverns played on unsuspecting visitors from afar.
Another extremely popular attraction was a collection of modern and ancient Japanese wooden secret boxes: these are boxes and chests of drawers containing non-obvious hooks, catches, weights, pivots and magnets such that the challenge is simply to open the box. Many of these can be solved by working out which parts of the objects will slide and in which directions - though it's seldom as simple as a single slide; you need to navigate the internal workings of the box through an incredibly intricately constructed maze.
These boxes have become much more sophisticated over the years; one box on display needs a particular sequence of 81 consecutive moves of its six panels in order to open it, which takes even a practiced box-slider ten or fifteen minutes and raises a sweat.
No wonder that when you eventually manage to slide all the panels out of their way and find out which panel can finally be removed to find the opening, it is customary to leave your business card within as a permanent record of who has solved the puzzle. Then there's 81 moves back again to return it to its innocuous-looking original position.
The weekend wound down, and all the medal, trophy and souvenir glass paperweight presentations took place at a very enjoyable barbecue party held at a nearby house belonging to one of the competitors. There was traditional American-style food and drinks on offer with the beer flowing all night.
Several teams partook of this heavily and took the opportunity to share drinking songs from around the world. A lot of local card games were also shared and taught to card game fans from around the world. Everybody had enjoyed the past weekend and taken it in the best of humour throughout.
So concludes another World Puzzle Championship, the ninth in the series. Future installments have a lot to live up to. This particular embodiment of the concept of people coming together from around the world in a meeting of minds has had a lot of attention to detail paid to it. The result - a fascinating variety of puzzles, carefully targeted so that everyone can get some right and very few can get all right, and attentive, courteous, caring service.
I think that everybody will go away from the Championship an even bigger fan of puzzles - and puzzle championships - than when they came here. So here's to a winter of practice in order to shine in next spring's qualifying test and hopefully earn a place at another chance of a lifetime party like this.
|
