Flex your mental muscles
Is your brain feeling underutilized? Not enough mental challenge
in your day job?
We can fix that.
Map the outer limits of your intellectual acuity by registering
for the Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, a national online competition
to identify America's most logical minds.
The top winner receives a spot on the US Puzzle Team and all expense
paid trips to Rio de Janeiro for the World Puzzle Championship
in October. The top 25 finishers receive prizes as well as the satisfaction
of knowing that what they know is well, pretty remarkable.
There's no entry fee. No special equipment is required. And the
questions don't favor a specific cultural background. To get a feel
for what you'll be up against, try the puzzles below. Solve them
and we may have a slot for you in our engineering department (we love logical
thinkers). If you'd prefer to see how others tackled the problems,
click on the answers link below.
The Google U.S. Puzzle Championship
will be held on Saturday, June 16, 2007 at 1pm EDT (GMT-4). The 16th World
Puzzle Championship will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October
6-11, 2007.
Warm up exercises
Puzzle #1 – Arrow Sudoku
In this Sudoku variation, each circled number is the sum of the
numbers along the corresponding arrow path.
Puzzle #2 –
Card Trick (Cihan Altay)
14 cards with digits are placed to make a 3x3 grid of numbers.
The totals for the numbers in each row and column are given.
Pick up two cards and place them back anywhere in the grid (still
face-up) so that the six totals become equal.
Puzzle #3 – Point Pairs (Cihan Altay)
Connect
pairs of points to make 13 straight line segments so that the
lengths are all of the whole numbers from 1 to 13. Each
point must be used just once, and cannot be on another line.
(The grid is shown only as a guide for measurement.)
Puzzle #4 – First Name Basis (Shawn
Kennedy)
|
Arrange the 16 names into
the grid so that each row and column contains exactly one
name (one letter per cell in order across or down, with some
optional spaces but no other letters not part of the word).
In the
example, the words WOOD, INCH, LATE, PUN, TERSE and STEW
appear going across; and WILT, NAPS, OCTET, OUR, DENSE and
HEW appear going down |
Example:
 |
ADA
ALDOS
ALEX
ANN
BYRON
ELIJAH
ELLA
HANS |
HESS
ISABEL
JOYCE
LANCE
LEAH
LENA
REX
SOL |
|
Puzzle
Answers |
