akrish

I’ve always been a big fan of puzzles and have enjoyed puzzle solving and recently (at least as far as I can tell) puzzles have become a huge thing in the engineering community. Since I’ve come to college, I’ve been given puzzles to solve by my friends, professors, teaching assistants, co-workers and all sorts of other people and it’s truly awesome. When I was a candidate for hkn there were several occasions where the members would just give us candidates puzzles to solve and those were some of the most memorable times of my candidate semester.

There’s also a whole deal about companies hosting puzzle competitions for college students. My housemates and I went down to Google one Saturday for Google Games, which pitted the top Cal students against the top Stanford students in a friendly but competition atmosphere. And the bulk of the competition revolved around puzzle solving. And as an intern, we had an event that involved us getting into groups and wandering around downtown Palo Alto solving puzzles. Both of these were really fun and these are the kind of events that make me want to work for a company.

So why do we like puzzles so much? I think at least one reason is that they challenge our intellect and as engineers (or maybe as students), we have to prove that we are really smart. Also there’s nothing better than solving a puzzle without any help and affirming your own intelligence. But puzzles can also be very social in nature. One night this summer, Prashant’s parents shared a puzzle with around 10 of us (not all engineers mind you) and they kept us all occupied for the night (mostly because none of us could figure out what later turned out to be simple puzzle). It was a pretty fun way to spend an evening with a bunch of my friends.

But puzzles can be really frustrating. There’s nothing worse that being the last person to figure out a puzzle (and trust me, it’s happened to me way too many times). Yet, I think ultimately the pros outweigh this potential frustration, especially if you can solve a lot of these puzzles.

Since puzzles also teach us how to think differently, I’ll leave you all with some of the harder ones that I’ve heard.

1. Actually first of all. check out my brothers website. Him and one of his friends have made a bunch of puzzles that are pretty fun.
2. This one my math GSI told us. So you have two nails nailed into a wall such that you’re trying to hang a picture frame on them. The standard way to hang a picture frame is to take a string, and go over both of the nails and then tie the ends to the corners of the frame. In this configuration, if I remove one of the nails, the picture will still hang from the other one. Find a way to hang the picture such that if both nails are in the wall the picture stays on the wall, but if either nail is removed the picture falls. It’s kind of confusing to explain with just words. If people are interested maybe I’ll put up a picture. Also there’s like a very mathematical solution to this one
3. I’ve heard this one a couple of times and it’s pretty insane. So I’m trying to communicate a message to a friend of mine by sending him an 8×8 bit matrix. We share a protocol before hand, that you’re supposed to figure out. I have a randomized 8×8 bit matrix and must flip one bit before sending it to my friend. How many unique messages can I encode (that he can understand) and what is the protocol?
   As an example: lets change the problem so that I have a zero-ed 8×8 bit matrix. Then I can send 64 unique messages and my protocol would be if the bit at [x][y] is on then take the (8*x + y)th message. Basically each element of the bit matrix corresponds to one message and I’d turn on the bit that corresponds to the message I want him to receive.

That’s all for now. If I think of some more that are good then I might make a page of puzzles. Hope those keep you all busy for awhile.