Google engineers lead puzzle challenge for student teams

Students braved Friday’s downpour and trekked out to Google Games — an unconventional meeting for students interested in Google — putting their teamwork and problem-solving skills to the test for one-and-a-half hours by working on six puzzles in groups.

“Do we need pencils, paper? Cheat sheets?” asked a student, looking up from a huddle with his teammates.

“No, just your brain,” said Rebecca Selvenis, who runs a New York Google office and coordinated Princeton’s Google Games.

The goal of the event is to familiarize students with the atmosphere and culture at Google. “We come to campus for recruiting events, but we also like to have fun,” Selvenis said, adding that Google Games is not a recruiting venture.

“This has been done all over the world,” Selvenis said. “We have 17 teams, and we’re glad we were able to accommodate the waiting list and even find teams for some competitors who enlisted as independents,” she added. Graduate students comprised about half of the pool of participants, though each undergraduate class was represented as well.

Students opened their puzzle packets and some immediately grinned while others fretted. Competitors looked anxious but enthusiastic as they chose how to divvy up the six puzzles among five teammates.

The puzzles were created by Google engineers, one of whom is the second-ranked Sudoku player in the world. The puzzles were play-tested in advance and bore titles such as Gadgetry, Ordering, Observation, Grid, Logic and Experience. The administrators declined to comment on the exact natures of the puzzles, since other schools will use them in similar events in the future.

Teams competed for the highest number of overall points, and only entirely correct solutions earned full credit. The first three teams to submit a correct answer for a particular puzzle received bonus points.

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While each team had six puzzles to work on, they were also provided with eight submission slips. The extra slips could be used to procure an additional copy of a puzzle if another team member wanted a shot or to try and catch a mistake and resubmit a previously incorrect answer.

Students rushed past each other to have administrators check their solutions, occasionally cursing or yelling triumphantly.

With five minutes left on the clock, Selvenis announced, “Each member of the winning team receives a $50 gift certificate to the Google Store.” After a quick pause in the commotion, students quickly dove back into a frenzy.

When time was called, a stampede of contestants headed to the front of the room for a last-minute answer check. Shortly after, Selvenis announced that all competitors would receive a Google Rubik’s Cube and then revealed a complete scoreboard as well as the winning team: Team Quintigrate.

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Team Quintigrate was the only group to finish all six puzzles, let alone correctly. The team consisted of Aaron Potechin ’09, Nathan Savir ’09, Adam Hesterberg ’11, Anton Malyshev ’09 and Wei Ho ’09. Hesterberg is also a copy editor for The Daily Princetonian.

Hesterberg explained the name “Quintigrate” as stemming from five tigers, the words “integrate” and “triumvirate” and a type of computer program called a “quine.”

“There’s so much energy. I’m glad it all went well,” Google engineer Dan Bentley said. “I was surprised at how hard some of the puzzles were, but by the end of it people were getting it,” he added.

The event, which took place in the computer science building, was co-sponsored by the Office of Career Services and the departments of computer science and electrical engineering.