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This Saturday, Brown's enigma-solving team "The Sons of Tamarkin" won Microsoft's fifth annual College Puzzle Challenge, beating the Massachusetts Institute of Technology by a margin of 180 seconds.
"The Sons of Tamarkin," consisting of four graduate students in the math department, traveled to Microsoft's Cambridge, Mass. office to decode puzzles and solve a fictional mystery involving the theft of the Rosetta stone.
Microsoft invites students from schools where it recruits, according to Microsoft Senior Program Manager Lead Brandon Bray. The goal of this contest is "to share what it's like to work at Microsoft" and show that its employees "enjoy creative stimulation outside of what we do on a daily basis at work," Bray said.
About 1,300 students - more than ever before - participated this year.
Competitors came from 19 schools, most of which brought between 15 and 30 teams each, Bray said. Brown was the only school to enter just one team. The runner-up was MIT's Vinyl Juntdown!!, and the second runner-up was Stanford's PhDeez, he said.
Brown's team named itself after a portrait on the first floor of the math department's building that portrays a former chair of the department.
The most creative team name this year, Bray said, was Cornell's HereForTheDrinksPleaseFeedUsBeerAndNotWater. "Unfortunately, we weren't able to serve beer."
This was Brown's first time participating in the College Puzzle Challenge, as well as the first puzzle competition for three out of four group members. Team member Dan Katz GS, who will receive a Ph.D. from Brown this May, has had a lot of experience with "puzzle hunts," he said.
Thomas Hulse GS said being enclosed in an overheated room for the seven hours and 36 minutes it took the group to solve the puzzle was "not that different from being in the math department."
"We were so busy that we didn't really have time to talk to each other and get sick of each other," said first-year grad student Diana Davis GS. "The math department is pretty close-knit, so we see each other a lot as it is," she added.
Katz said he found the experience "inspiring because my three teammates pretty much had no experience doing cooperative puzzle events. ... It was fun to see the looks on their faces when they would solve something for the first time and it was correct."
The highlight of the competition for Hulse was winning, he said, especially since the team was in third or fourth place for most of the time.
Brown's victory over MIT "was very unexpected," said Joris Weimar GS.
After solving puzzles involving number sequences, word patterns and other feats requiring logic and critical thinking, participants discovered that the thief was Dr. Solvem, a character who often comes up in Microsoft's puzzles, Bray said.
Once the team put all the clues together, though, the final answer to the puzzle was "woohoo," Davis said, adding that the answer was meant to congratulate the team on its success.
