Pieces of Papendal
by Wei-Hwa Huang, USA
The 2003
World Puzzle Championship was held in the Papendal
sports complex in Arnhem,
a town in the mideast of the Netherlands. Nick
Baxter, captain of the USA Puzzle Team
and also organizer of the Google US
Puzzle Championship, traveled with me to the event all the way from the
San Francisco peninsula, solving practice puzzles all the way, such as the Dutch
magazine Brein Brekers, published by Puzzelsport,
the main sponsor of the event.
As part of preparation for solving the sort of puzzles that were not going
to be in the competition at all, I had solved the (cryptic) crossword in the
Financial Times on the plane ride (my first
ever cryptic solved without consulting external references! yay!). I would later
check my answers with Will
Shortz, whose name should require no further introduction to anyone reading
this report.
The day of arrival was calm and laid-back; a good time to meet old friends
and new and get in a small game of "midget golf" (the Dutch name for miniature
golf), especially since the course would be crowded with puzzlers three days
from now.
Another exciting part was meeting the two new US team members: Todd Geldon,
a graduate student in mathematics at UT-Austin, and Michael Miller, a mechanical
engineer from Pensacola, Florida. The fourth team member, Roger Barkan, didn't
arrive until much later. I introduced a game I had purchased at the Frankfurt
airport on the way -- "6
Nimmt" by Wolfgang Kramer. (It had been released as "Take 6" in the US about
10 years ago but had long since gone out of print.) In that we were also joined
by Ulrich Voigt, the two-time world puzzle champion from Germany who apparently
knows his share of German games as well.
The next morning started off with a question-and-answer section on the instructions.
This session ran shorter and cleaner than previous years, thanks to the foresight
the organizers had of putting the puzzle
instructions on the WWW one week before the event.
This was soon followed by a photo shoot, where the entire American entourage
looked quite smart in their first-ever official team jackets, donated generously
by our sponsor, Google.
This year's organization was much more spartan in its scheduled events; we
would have one day to overcome our jet lag (not a problem for me and Nick, since
we had arrived a few days earlier to attend the annual Dutch
Cube Day) and we had a choice between three excursions; a shopping trip
to downtown Arnhem, a trip to Burger's Zoo,
or a trip to the Arnhem open-air
museum, where everyone would also have dinner (including my first ever experience
with Baked Alaska).
Although this was in sharp contrast with previous years when it seemed like
there were always too many excursions and not enough sleep, as it turns out
we never found ourselves with lack of things to do.
All of the Americans, with the exception of Roger the rebel, went shopping.
No puzzle stores, but I found a few games to buy, including Villa
Paletti, winner of the 2002 Game of the Year (Spiel
des Jahres) award. Nick found a Dutch edition of 6 Nimmt, which apparently
is called "Take 5!"
in Dutch and is nominated for this year's Nederlandse
Spellenprijs. (I'll let you solve the puzzle of why there's an apparent
numerical discrepancy. But feel free to ask me for the answer.) Although I found
a used bookstore, Will Shortz had already cleaned out most of the puzzle books
of note, leaving only the dregs for me -- including a 1995 issue of Brein Brekers!
Very interesting to open up the booklet and see how different the magazine looked
then, with an editor's note written by Rob Geensen, now organizer of the WPC.
(Those notes were actually ghostwritten by Peter
Ritmeester, and would be later written under his own name. They're now written
by Hans Eendebak.)
Mealtimes were filled with lots of puzzle discussion at the tables. For instance,
earlier Will had asked the whole WPC if anyone had any good international puzzles
that he could use on his weekly
segment on National Public Radio's Weekend Edition Sunday. He eventually
decided on a nice puzzle for his October 19th show (I believe yours truly was
mentioned on the show as well), which I won't reproduce here. One close contender
was the riddle: "I have 11 brothers and sisters, 48 nieces and nephews, and
28 grandchildren. Who or what am I?" (I don't remember who came up with this
puzzle -- apologies in advance for not crediting you here.)
The next day the competition started. This year there was much more variety
in the different scoring formats -- for instance, a 30-minute "sprint" round
where only the number of puzzles you solve matters, not which ones; and a "relay"
round where you need the solution to the previous puzzle to be able to solve
the next one. After that first day, I was (perhaps irrationally) depressed;
I had an unspectacular round 1, and had spent 25 precious minutes on a tedious
45-point puzzle in round 2, only to make a small mistake and gain no points.
To top it off, I lost really badly at our yearly traditional game of Rifki
to Husnu Sincar,
the Turk who would later be elected to a position on the World Puzzle Federation
Committee to take Erja Gullsten's vacated seat.
As it turns out, I was too pessimistic. At that point, I was actually tied
for fourth place with Niels Roest, the Dutch champion from last year, 5 points
behind Roger, and a whopping 140 points behind Ulrich. The team standings were
similar, with us in second place, behind the Germans by 176 points and barely
staying ahead of the Dutch by 7 points.
The second day's competition spread out the pack, with the timing of the rounds
being more accurately paced with the top competitors. One of the exciting team
rounds was entitled "The Weakest Link", where each of the four members of the
team have to solve a puzzle individually to get one quarter of the final puzzle.
This was a killer round, with only Belgium and the Netherlands managing to finish.
By the time the dust had settled, the Germans were in a comfortable lead with
3807 points, the Dutch in second at 3699, and Team USA in third with 3611. With
only one individual round in round 3 worth a maximum of 50 points (and that
only to the fastest individual competitor), Ulrich had secured his first-place
seed for the finals with 1150 points, whild I had secured second with 1035 points
-- Roger and Niels were tied at third with 935, their only danger being Michael
Ley of Germany with 885.
That night, Metin Orsel of Turkey invited Nick, me, and Derek Kisman of Canada
for a rematch of a complex bidding version of Rifki that we had invented at
the WPC in Oulu, Finland last year. Derek declined (he had been up at 3AM the
day before for a TopCoder competition!), but Metin's teammate Umyt Abaciodlu
filled out the fourth. A great game, but with only one playtest per year, it
needs some work -- at 10 minutes per hand, a full game of 20 hands takes quite
a while!
The third and last day of the competition began. Roger pulled out the fastest
finish, securing the 3rd place seed for him (and 4th place for Niels). But with
Roger being the only American to finish, compared to two each from Germany and
the Netherlands, we basically needed a perfect score on the last team round
to gain second place, while the Dutch needed the same perfect score to gain
first. Fortunately, we didn't know this and the Dutch did -- we went on to be
the only team to solve the last round, an exciting cube-construction puzzle
that is now sitting on my desk at work at the time I write this.
But on to the individual playoffs, a single-elimination matchup between the
top eight competitors. Each matchup would have the two competitors on stage
solving three giant puzzles on posterboard, with no time limit except the solving
speed of one's opponent, and a very large audence watching to add to the excitement.
(For instance, one of my friends, the talented puzzle designer Oskar van Deventer,
had made a special visit to see the finals and was in the audience.) Once a
contestant decided to submit their answers, both would stop solving, and the
winner would be decided based on whether those submitted answers were correct
or not -- the progress of the other person being completely irrelevant!
As there was only room for four competitors at a time, Roger and I had to
wait inside a shielded room with 6th seed Sebastien Leroy from Belgium and 7th
seed Shinichi Aoki from Japan, while outside Ulrich faced-off against 8th place
Zoltan Horvath from Hungary with Niels and Michael on the other side of the
stage.
Five minutes passed. Then ten. We were getting nervous; apparently the quarter-final
puzzles weren't going to be easy! A big cheer of applause erupted from the other
room; Ulrich had defeated Zoltan. But neither Niels nor Michael were close;
we waited for what seemed like an interminable time (probably just another 10
minutes) before another wave of applause happened -- Niels, world champion from
2002, had been eliminated in the first low-seed upset!
Then our competition started. We were a bit more prepared because we knew
how much time the other four had took. I finished reasonably quickly (probably
about the same amount of time that Ulrich took) and took the risk of checking
my answers before submitting -- although if I had known how close Shinichi was
at that point I probably wouldn't have! Roger took much longer to defeat Sebastien,
but he did, ensuring that regardless of who won in the semifinals, the finals
were going to be a German versus an American.
The semifinals began. Although spectators later told me that I looked amazingly
calm on stage, with my left hand in my pocket as I swaggered around, I have
to declare now that my left hand was in my pocket to stop it from shaking from
nervousness! But I mangaged to solve all three puzzles, and was debating on
whether to check them when I heard a wave of applause behind me; Ulrich had
declared. That clinched it; I decided not to check and to submit my answers
as well. Thankfully, they were correct. It would now be me against Ulrich in
the final, and to be honest I probably wouldn't be betting on me...
The three puzzles in the finals were indeed harder than the quarterfinals
or semifinals. Ulrich and I both polished one (star battle) off quickly, but
then we were stuck on the other two. I shuffled my boards back and forth a lot,
which (I found out later) really unnerved Ulrich because it sounded like I was
making progress. But that was far from the case; one of the puzzles (a cross-sums)
needed a key insight to make progress, and the other (an abcd-fill) needed either
an extremely intricate deduction or a lucky guess to make work. I had neither;
Ulrich managed to find both the insight and the luck, to take his (well-deserved)
third crown as world puzzle champion.
So the conclusion was that with the exception of Niels and Michael switching
places, the top seed always beat out the lower seed. I wonder how they would've
handled the final ranking if any of the other potental upsets had happened!
The closing ceremonies were well-orchestrated but otherwise unremarkable and
not unlike the other dinners we had, with some form of beef stew (Todd and Mike
joked that all our dinners seemed to have beef stew in some form or another)
and Dutch performers on stage singing American pop tunes from the last 50 years
while us Americans ignored them and worked on puzzles. I was working on a rather
elegant multi-layered puzzle designed by Roger (in previous years Roger, as
a puzzle designer for things like the MIT
mystery hunt, had brought WPC-style warmup puzzles, but this year all he
had was a English-dependent one called "The Battle for Skyport") and eventually
got it, with some help from the UK team. In the meantime, a big game of Rasende
Roboter ("Ricochet Robot" in English)
was going on in the back of the room.
The trophy was beautiful and very puzzly -- a jigsaw puzzle of a globe, replete
with continents and land features, cast in gorgeous metal that were held to
a sphere through magnetism. Unfortunately, my second-place individual trophy
had three missing pieces, inexplicably, and so I left it with Rob for replacement.
I'm pretty sure I'll see it soon, though!
As a nice parting gift, the organizers of the 2004 World Puzzle Championship
in Croatia gave me a book filled with beautiful pictures of the Adriatic. Here's
looking to next year, where maybe Zack (whom, I've been told, was missed both
on the soccer field and off) can return to writing these trip reports!
