Puzzle Challenge
Retrocogitator Puzzle Masters Revealed!
Scenes from the Retrocogitator war room: from left, puzzle masters Eric Price, Adam Rosenfield, and Lanthe Chronis monitor teams' progress and answer questions via email. Photo: Maggy Bruzelius.
The Retrocogitator Puzzle Challenge, a test of wits that invited alumni and students to solve a series of Web-based puzzles in September 2008, bubbled out of the minds of four undergraduates. The students, recruited by the MIT Alumni Association for the task, won praise for the elegance and challenge of their 18 puzzles plus a metapuzzle from many of the 725 participants whose comments ranged from "a wondrous piece of work" to "quite a nail biter."
All four have been contenders or champions of venerable contests from the MIT Mystery Hunt to the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. In fact, Lanthe Chronis '08, Pete Kruskall '08, Eric Price '09, and Adam Rosenfield '08 all competed on the same team for a recent Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge. Not counting the technical aspects of the Alumni Association hunt, the development of the puzzles took a whopping 1,000 person hours, they say. Fortunately, two, Chronis and Kruskall, were able to get credit in their spring User Interface Design class for developing the puzzle software.
"We'd meet twice a week to have brainstorming sessions in which we'd talk out ideas," says Chronis, whose puzzle victories include the 2005 MIT Mystery hunt and a Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge grand prize. "At the end of the meetings, we'd take the promising ideas and assign one person to follow up-they'd figure out whether the idea was feasible, pull together images and media, and then, each puzzle would get test solved by two or three outside people. This made sure that each puzzle was actually doable and that there weren't any errors."
Development continued over the summer, often by iChat or Skype, to include Kruskall, who was an intern in Florida. At least once he turned on "Skype surreptitiously in the corridor outside my office, hoping no one would notice a young intern with headphones on, apparently talking to himself about puzzles."
The students worked up to the last moment. "We were frantically searching for every last problem, from technical challenges-like when we realized that Internet Explorer users wouldn't be able to view the homepage successfully-to puzzle bugs," Chronis says.
The high noon kickoff was also a bit frantic as Kruskall, groggy with only two hours sleep and unable to find a parking place near the Student Center where a war room was established, finally double parked in front of Simmons Dorm, leapt out of the car with his laptop, and searched for a wireless signal.
"I ran around aimlessly with my laptop perched in one hand with my cell phone in the other," Kruskall says. "Meanwhile, coincidentally, given our first puzzle's theme of the Engineer's Drinking Song, the MIT Marching Band was having practice across the street, bursting into a rousing rendition of the famous song as I managed to find an errant WiFi signal to release the hunt."
At the war room, students and helpers armed with laptops answered questions via email and reviewed creative challenge submissions. The students also visited campus teams where they found a buzz of excitement, some frustration, and fun. And Chronis won the puzzle masters' private bet on when the puzzle would be completed. "I made the most optimistic guess at 7:15 p.m. on the day that it was released," says Chronis, "and the Sattelite Seattlelites beat my estimate by about half an hour."
So Who Won?
The speed prizes went to two alumni teams and one student team, which finished in seven, 12, and 13 hours respectively. The $1,000 first-place prize went to the Satellite Seattlelites: Mark Gottlieb '96, Sean Trowbridge '89, Daniel Katz '03, Tanis O'Connor '02.
Usman Akeju '04 of New York won an iRobot Roomba-made by the alumni-founded robotics firm-for the best poem, "The Zeroth Robo Sapiens." Freshmen Daniel Levine and Elizabeth George and sophomores Dora Gao and Julie Henion of team Pamplemousse won a new version of Rock Band 2 software from alumni-founded Harmonix Music Systems for writing the best new stanza to the Engineers' Drinking Song.
A life-size standing cutout of Oliver Smoot '62 went to the Grifters team, Charlene Gladden '93, SM '94 and her spouse Jason Gladden '91 from Texas, for their tremendous effort-713 answers submitted. "We had a great time pouring over the puzzles this year; so our sincere thanks to everybody who put this together," they wrote. "In terms of quality and creativity and organization, it was a truly impressive undertaking.
By Nancy DuVergne Smith
Published December 17, 2008
