Microsoft Puzzle Hunt

Hello,

There will be an intellectual game, called Puzzle Hunt, held at Microsoft on the weekend of September 21-22. Briefly speaking, it is going to be a mission of acquiring and solving puzzles for points. The puzzles are not trivial but that's the main reason it's so much fun about it. The whole event has also some adventurous accents, where upon solving one puzzle we may discover that the next riddle or a clue awaits hidden somewhere on the MS campus.

It's a team competition but we won't have any interaction with other teams. We will play completely on our own. We will just keep online contact with the organizers to send them our solutions or ask for hints when we are completely "stuck". Teams may be up to 12 people large and the rule is that half of the team members must be MS employees. There are already 5 MS employees on my team and I'm looking for 6 more volunteers who love intellectual games and would like to have some fun with us. It's perfectly fine if you don't work for MS and there are no restrictions regarding age, gender, etc.

If you would like to participate or have any questions, please, let me know :)

Hello all, There were a few questions about "Puzzle Hunt" which I would like to address here as well. The "Puzzle Hunt" game starts at 10AM on Saturday. It's a two day event but if you can't make it to stay for the entire duration that's fine too.

Some of us may choose to go out for lunch together and some others will bring their food along. There is a big choice of soft drinks at MS which are free.

If you love puzzles but you don't enjoy chasing the clues on the MS campus - that's perfectly fine as well. You will be a very valuable member of the team and you don't have to join our "expedition group" if you don't like to. There will be members who will prefer to take a break or continue working on other puzzles (if we have more than one at a time).

In case you can't join us at MS campus personally but you want to participate remotely - please, let me know. If we don't have enough team members, we will be happy to count you in and communicate with you online.

If we have more puzzles at the same time or we can split one into smaller pieces, we may decide to split our team into 2 or 3 sub-teams to work on them in parallel.

Many of us will not know each other before the game begins but I hope it's not an obstacle. When we have a full team, I will send an email to all members introducing each of us briefly.

I'm looking forward to hearing from you soon.

Shortly before the event Greg sent the interested parties a sample puzzle to get us primed to go. It was in the form of a web page which I have installed here. In the place of the 'Get Answer' field, there would instead be a page to submit an answer to the people running the puzzle hunt.

That is a pretty easy one. Greg also sent us a zip file with puzzles from previous hunts. These give a better idea of what the puzzles were like.

Well our team lost several members as the sample puzzles were so tough, so we merged with another team, Dry Eraser. There were about thirty teams trying to solve the puzzles. Our team was made of people pretty new to Microsoft (mostly about two years with them) and so we weren't very experienced. We also took things at a liesurely pace and enjoyed ourselves. As a result we were in the bottom quarter when we went home (about 2PM Sunday).

The event started at 10AM on Saturday and had three rounds of puzzles, the last of which was released at about 10PM on Saturday evening. We solved about ten of the thirty or so puzzles. They were really tough puzzles and you really need many people and some time to solve them. Also, you could submit as many guesses as you liked and often you would just make a submission to see if you were headed in the right direction. Anyway, we had a good time.

This page was last updated on January 1, 2004