Capricious Me

Ghost Patrol this past weekend was so much fun. The little extra things the GC did really added up and made it my favorite Halloween thus far.

Having seen a lot of puzzles, ranging from great to terrible – I’m getting a sense of what makes a puzzle good. Hopefully this will help us in writing our puzzle in DASH 3… So what are key components to puzzles? In no particular order:
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Hrm, so a lot’s happened. I went on a great trip to Thailand, the Netherlands (with a quick excursion to Belgium), and then England. When I came back, there was the annual Oakland conference and Google I/O. Then Shinteki… and then meeting other DASHers. (Oh yes, did I mention that I helped to put on a puzzlehunt in Davis? Now I have so much more appreciation for people who put on hunts and the work that goes into each puzzle.)

I’ve gotten into cryptic crosswords lately, and FF13. I got this book of cryptics that initially seemed like tons of fun, but I’m starting to realize that the clues are rather poorly written. I can feel how forced and contrived they are… but practice is practice.

I’m at the point in grad school where I want to graduate. I’m not confident that I’ll find my dream job, but at least my proximity to Silicon Valley means that I’ll at least find a job… I hope. This summer I’ll be working towards graduation and trying my hand at planning a puzzlehunt of my own.

Today was puzzleday. The day was so awesome. The puzzle creators and people planning the event were all dressed up in costumes. Among the attendees, several Star Trek crew, a grunt (from Halo), Master Chief, a flower/vines creature (mother earth?), Darth Maul, a Jedi knight, Neo (from The Matrix), a cardassian… Oh, the costumes did not disappoint.

When we were at the closing ceremonies, the author of the puzzle or a representative would explain how to solve each puzzle. One of the authors was… KEVIN LITWACK. From my high school! I remembered then that Lily had told me that he was at Microsoft and I’d confirmed that there was a Kevin Litwack working there. I didn’t know him very well, but Lily and he were on debate team together.

Pain Train Synchronetics (5 pts plz!), my team, came in third today (we were the 3rd team to complete the metapuzzle) but we had the highest overall score and solved every puzzle but one (which is at least 2 more than any other team, including the teams that solved metapuzzles before us) so I was really pleased. As a prize, we each got a little star trophy with a hologram of a shooting star that says, “Third Place – Lieutenant” and a Mars Mission Lego set and a handshake from Master Chief. (The theme was space related.) The 1st and 2nd place teams got pretty much the same prizes.

Puzzlehunts are fun. I wish they would bring college puzzle challenge to UCD, but I doubt that we’ll be so lucky.

Professor Layton and the Curious Village is an AWESOME, AWESOME game full of puzzles and brain teasers. I can’t wait for the sequel!!! now that I’ve thoroughly beaten the game, I can only wait for the weekly puzzles. Penny Arcade did a great take on the game that I love in Professor Layton and the Perpetual Torment.

And whoever implemented Puzzle Quest’s path traversal either enjoys plotting convoluted paths, or judging by the inconsistencies in the path selections, really sucks at graph theory. Um, hello? There’s a subset of algorithms for the SHORTEST PATH problem for a REASON. It’s not like they’re finding the shortest path for randomly changing graph configurations. Every town/node is fixed. They could have hard coded it!!!