Conclusion

The Puzzle Party 2011 is over. It was held on Aug 6, 2011 at Kensington Metro Park Shelter C (Spring Hill Shelter). It was a hot and muggy day but it rained a bit during the afternoon. However, shelter was big enough to accommodate all the participants well.

We had approximately 50 participants ranging in age from 2 years all the way to 60+.

What is a “Puzzle Party”?

I get this question a lot (especially during last two years) so I thought I will describe the origin of this event and what it is about.

The Puzzle Party is a get together where the hosts engage guests in a set of challenges to solve a set of puzzles. These puzzles are not typical “arrange pieces of cardboard” puzzles. These are serious puzzles involving math, logic, science and quite a few other odd topics. We usually try to keep away from trivia type questions but this time around we had included a little bit of those too for variety.

The event usually starts with guests selecting a team and then hosts rationalizing the teams a bit if required. The puzzle rules are read out in the beginning of the event and then the puzzle solving event starts. The teams are assigned separate work and collaboration areas where they can solve the puzzles.

Some puzzles require teams to demonstrate a solution. For example, our popular puzzle around “object describing” is a great example where two members from a team are selected to play this. One member (known as “The Describer”) is handed an object whereas the other member (known as “The Builder”) is given the raw material or building blocks to build the same object. They have sit facing away from each other. The describer has to describe the construction instructions to the builder and the builder has to build the object. There’s usually a time limit and the points are given on the completeness and resemblance factor of the built object to the original. Unfortunately due to the close space in which teams were working this time around, we had to drop this puzzle. We will reuse this puzzle for 2012 event!

The actual puzzle solving event lasts for 2/2.5 hours. Then we usually spend an hour going over the solutions and ranking of solutions by each team. At the end there are prizes for every team. Obviously winners get to pick their prizes first! The prizes usually included large poster size prints of photos taken by me. They go off fast and I am assuming that families usually put these up in their homes but not sure!

I usually combine other activities for the events held in park. In 2008, we had arranged for a Puzzle hunt which was like a scavenger hunt. This time around, we just had some games and food in the park – picnic style.

I started hosting the puzzle parties in 2005 and I was inspired by similar such events around the US. We have been holding it ever since. First two or three events were small and were held at my home. However, since 2008, we took it outside to the Kensington Metro Park. The Puzzle Party of 2010 was held in New Jersey with my project team in the hotel in July 2010 when I was concluding my engagement.

Pattabi has been my partner in crime for all the events except the 2010 event where I reused some of the past puzzles. He moved to California in 2010 and this time around he supported me remotely.

Here’s how Puzzle Party 2011 event unfolded

t–2.5 months

Shelter sign-up was the biggest dependency for the Puzzle Party. I really like the Shelter C (Spring Hill) in Kensington Metro Park. It is rather secluded and it has a very large area with lots of trees. We have been holding events here for last 2-3 years.

I started working with Pattabi and started selecting and sorting out puzzles. We had few selected through the year. We had some 50+ puzzles to work from and selected 39 of them. From there, we cut the final selection down to 29 puzzles. The memory puzzle and the object describing puzzles took the longest to prepare but I thought it was worth it. The object describing puzzle was taken out due to logistical issues and will be included in future events.

t–1 week through the t-1 day

Finalized all the puzzles, solutions and other logistical items and finished printing. This time I went with binders and “outsourced” those activities to Fedex Kinko’s. They did a great job of printing and preparing the binders. I was ready by Thu with all the items.

The food was ordered from Mirchi – the local Indian restaurant in Novi, MI. Their food is good and they delivered to the park at no additional charge. In and all, I am pretty happy with their food and service.

This time around, we had guests coming in from Germany and New York. They arrived Friday. I also had to buy drinks and snacks and local Sam’s club filled the need nicely.

Finally on Friday I also ordered Pizza for the kids from Village Pizza of Milford, MI. Again, I am very happy with their service.

August 6, 2011 - The Day of the Puzzle Party

We had roughly planned following activities for the Puzzle Party:

11 to 1:30 – Gather, play games in the park and have lunch (sponsored by Innowix)

2 – 4 – Puzzle solving

5 – Prize distribution

5:15 onwards - Games or go home

We pretty much followed the original plan. I had to cut down couple of puzzles but I think the remaining puzzles were sufficient to challenge the teams.

Teams

Norm was the first one to arrive followed closely by Alana and her family and then others. Everybody picked their teams as and when they arrived. After rationalizing for proper adult/kids ratio and keeping family members in separate teams, we had following teams.

We ended up with 2-3 kids per team and for the most part this worked out OK. We had marked appropriate puzzles for kids so that they can go off and solve their own puzzles.

Games in the Park

We warmed up playing some games – Frisbee, “Foot tag” and like.

Pizza was delivered right on time at 12:15 PM and just about at the same time the Mirchi delivery person showed up with the main course.

After attacking food, teams were chomping at the bits to solve the puzzles. I described the rules and handed out the puzzle folders. And off they went…

Puzzle Table of Content

Here are the puzzles that were included in this year’s puzzle party:

As you can see, the puzzles were designed to exercise various parts of the brain – memory, language, logic, visual aspects and some trivia too. I have seen that some people excel in specific areas. I myself do better with visual puzzles whereas Pattabi is great at math and probability puzzles.

Memory Puzzle

I also had to force the teams to start reviewing the memory puzzle as it depended on my laptop as the shared object which all teams had to use to watch the video segment. I have to admit that this time’s memory puzzle based on the video segment from “The Big Bang Theory” was a difficult one. The video segment has both visual and audio elements. Playing the video segment in the shelter on my laptop with puny speakers at low enough volume was less than optimistic but I thought teams did pretty OK with answers.

Here’s the video segment that I showed

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqp8_ROAIJY&feature=related

The video segment covered the full opening credits including all the pics they show. Not sure who collected those pics but there are people who have reviewed each picture frame-by-frame and have attempted to identify those.

So, here’s the opening credit video of The Big Bang Theory (in three speeds – NORMAL, SLOW and VERY SLOW): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2mP_lq12mc&feature=related

And here’s frame-by-frame analysis of the video and pictures contained within (along with source): http://haraldkraft.de/thebigbangtheory/

Around 2:45 PM the rumbling in the clouds started and I had to clear out tables in the shelter where teams can work. Right about 3 PM it started drizzling and teams moved inside.

Other Interesting Puzzles

Pick up the marble

Another interesting puzzle was “Pick up the marble”. The puzzle was simple and required demonstration to the Puzzlemaster. Here’s the original description:

The Puzzlemaster will draw a rough square on your table and place a marble inside it. You will be given a container too. You have to put the marble in the container with following conditions. The marble cannot go outside square drawn on the table and it cannot be pushed off the edge of the table. You cannot touch the marble or pick it up. You also cannot use any other device. Also, you cannot break the table, container or the marble!

Once you have figured out the solution, please call the Puzzlemaster and demonstrate the solution.

Solutions:

Couple of teams came up with some innovative solutions. First was simply placing the container on top of the marble and telling me that “it is in the container!”. Well – not quite. But I did give 5 bonus points for the out-of-the-box thinking for that solution. The other idea was to blow the marble into the container. That idea also got 5 additional bonus points (two teams came up with this idea!). At the end, all teams solved this puzzle. The solution is to put the container on top of the marble and then rotate the container such that the marble starts moving in circles and eventually due to centrifugal force, it gets higher in the container where you can safely turn the container upside down while the marble is still moving inside.

Good job teams!

Movie Rebus

Movie Rebuses are another set of interested puzzles. The idea is to “encode” famous movie names and represent words using visual monikers usually literal translation into visual context.

Here are few examples of movie rebus puzzles which I had created.

Solution: K in G and K on G or King Kong

Here’s another one:

Skunk Pickle Rough Scream Green Feel

Solution: Each of the first give words represent senses and the sixth word is a sense which is really not a sense but it is in a way The Sixth Sense.

Here’s one more:

Solution: This should be easy to guess. It is a symbol for men and with “Fe” inside the circle which represents the chemical symbol for the element Iron and hence “Ironman” is the answer.

Draw the figure

Another interesting puzzle was this classic where you have to draw the diagram without lifting your pencil or going over the same line again.

Here’s how it was presented in the puzzle party:

Draw the pattern shown below with the constraints described:

a. On a piece of paper with just a pencil/pen without lifting the pen/pencil or going over the same line again.

b. On a whiteboard with just a marker without lifting the marker from the whiteboard or going over the same line again.

Now, if you use the right keywords on Google/Youtube, you will find the solution where for the first potion of the puzzle where you just have to fold the paper to move the pencil from one point to another without drawing a line on the side of the page where you are drawing. I expected teams to know this and that is why I added an extension by asking them to demonstrate the same diagram on a whiteboard. Now, how do you fold a whiteboard? Now, that is something for you to figure out and drop me a note!

You Cartoonist!

This was a new puzzle this time around where I took some famous comic strips and took out the punch line. The idea was for the teams to look at the strip and then provide their own punch line. I wanted the solutions to be rated by peer teams and the team with the most “Likes” would be given the appropriate points. Unfortunately we ran out of time and I took out this puzzle from the point calculations.

I reviewed some of the captions at home and some of them were quite different than the originals and quite witty. I will probably include some in next year’s party too.

The strips were from Foxtrot by Bill Amend and Far Side by Gary Larson – two of my favorite nerdy/geeky and absolutely genius comic strips. I highly recommend these to anybody looking for some highly imaginative comics.

Solution discussions

This I guess is the most intense portion of the puzzle party – at least for me as the Puzzlemaster as I have to defend myself and the puzzles and the solutions! The teams are not sympathetic and the competitive nature of the party comes out. The teams used varied tricks including threats (mostly by my wife!), cajoling, logic, demonstration, arguments and laughter to convince the Puzzlemaster to give the points.

Here’s how that went.

<< insert video >>

Winners

At the end, Mark Willis’ reigned supreme and won the competition by a wide margin. I am thinking that I will make him the puzzlemaster next time around to balance things out! Norm couldn’t stay for long but his team did well too in quite some puzzles.

The point tally below:

Prizes

This time around we had variety of prizes. As usual I had printed some of my pictures. NO! Not pics of me but the pictures taken by me of some of the national parks where we had visited in last year or two.

These included pictures from the Banff National Park (Canada), Yoho National Park (Canada), Garden of the Gods (Colorado, USA), Lassen Volcanic National Park (California, USA), Crater Lake National Park (Oregon, USA) and view of Pacific Ocean off Route 1 from Oregon to San Francisco.

Here are pictures on Picasa.

https://picasaweb.google.com/104227692000310772238/PuzzleParty2011Prizes#

In addition, we also had mugs branded with Innowix logo. Those were popular (I thought!). This was an experiment for me as I had ordered these mugs for the first time. Unfortunately one batch of mugs arrived after the party and so I had limited number of mugs for prizes at the party.

For those brave kids who participated in the puzzle party, I had ordered some great educational books. Here’s a list of these books. I would love to hear from the parents on their/kid’s feedback on the book your kid picked up.

http://amzn.com/w/1VT5MNZMZADY9

Fractals, Googols, and Other Mathematical Tales by Theoni Pappas

Q Is for Quark: A Science Alphabet Book by David M. Schwartz, Kim Doner

The Man Who Counted: A Collection of Mathematical Adventures by Malba Tahan, et al. We actually had a puzzle based on a story of Samir from this book (Egyptian Camel Tax).

G Is for Googol: A Math Alphabet Book by David M. Schwartz, Marissa Moss

Further Adventures of Penrose the Mathematical Cat by Theoni Pappas

The Number Devil: A Mathematical Adventure by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, et al

Kon-Tiki: Across the Pacific in a Raft [Mass Market Paperback] by Thor Heyerdahl

A Guide to Skywatching [Paperback] by David H. Levy (Author)

Thesaurus (DK Pockets) [Paperback] by DK Publishing (Author)

Thank you!

In closing, “Thank you” all for coming and joining us for the party. I hope it was as much fun for you as it was for us to put together. I guess I will have to see next year’s repeat attendance by guests to see if teams this year really liked the event or not!

Feedback and Lessons Learned:

We would love to hear your feedback and other ideas. In my conversations with some of you, we have heard following feedback and some lessons learned:

1. It was good idea to involve kids but separate out their puzzles in a different binder which can be given off to them.

2. Hosting the event in the park is a good idea but please hold it in spring or fall when the weather is temperate.

3. Reduce the number of puzzles. I think 20 puzzles is probably the most optimum number. I need to stop getting carried away!

Any other feedback items? Leave your comments on this page or send me an e-mail.

Until next time…

Hiren and Pattabi

All the videos are on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLBE05C6EC12BE23E7&feature=mh_lolz

Note to self: Keep the camcorder steady while taking videos! It can make people watching these videos sick. Sorry folks!

Some of the pictures from the Puzzle Party are posted on Picasa at: