This one time at CPC ...

Do I miss math team?

What do you think?

So when Kee Young talked to me about joining his CPC (Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge) team, I jumped at the opportunity. Even though I was never particularly good at contest math, I still love to do it, and as we know it's always a party even when we're failing.

The team consisted of Kee Young, Ben, Tanay and myself. You know Kee Young, and many of you know Ben. He's from Blair, the inferior school across the river. Tanay is from a school in New Jersey called "High Technology High School" or "High Tech High" for short. Best name ever.

So what is CPC? It's not really contest math, although coding knowledge probably helps a lot. It's a bunch of puzzles, some of the most tricky I've ever seen, despite the fact that we're allowed to call on basically every resources we have. Here's a quick example of a puzzle listed as "easy" (and one of the few I managed to solve >_<)

Reading the Oscars

The studio has been in a slump all year (the theme was making a movie), but we can turn it around at the upcoming Academy Awards. We got an early copy of the nominations list to scope out the toughest competitors. Take a look, then run it by our PR company Charles Barbier & Associates - they'll know how we can best move forward!

Studio Submission: Paper Heart

Frontrunner Loss? Win?

Rockn Rolla [ ] [ ]

Blade Runner [ ] [ ]

Edward Scissorhands [ ] [ ]

Studio Submission: The Rocky Horror Picture Show

Frontrunner Loss? Win?

Paper Moon [ ] [ ]

Running with Scissors [ ] [ ]

The Paper [ ] [ ]

Studio Submission: Sling Blade

Frontrunner Loss? Win?

Harry Potter and the Socercerer's Stone [ ] [ ]

The Hand that Rocks the Cradle [ ] [ ]

Romancing the Stone [ ] [ ]

Pretty quickly we realized that the numerous references to rocks, paper, and scissors were obviously not a coincidence. Paper beats rock, rock beats scissors, scissors beats paper. Excited, we plugged in ROCKPAPERSCISSORS as our answer, only to have it tell us: "INCORRECT. A good decision making tool indeed ..."

As it turns out, once you check off the appropriate winners and google the name Charles Barbier, you find out that he was an officer in the French army who developed codes for Napolean. Again, I'm not so great with history so while this might be well-known, it was news to me. In particular, this code formed the basis for Braille.

So when you look up Braille on wikipedia you find this image;

Very suspicious, no? Checking off who should win by virtue of Rock, Paper, Scissors and then reading off the letters from each Braille cell yields the correct answer, "sol."

CPC starts at 12 noon (but you have to get there at 11 to get the free shirt, so of course we showed up an hour early). The event continues until submission closes at 12 midnight, and the awards ceremony starts at 12:15 am. When we saw that, we laughed. Seriously? 12 hours. No way we're staying that long.

We didn't stay that long. We left at 11:30.

It was fun though. The puzzles, the laughter. ARML-esque, I would call it. Probably the highlight of the day though, was when they called us down for our skit.

The skit was yet another puzzle, and it turned out to probably be the easiest puzzle of the lot. First they handed us an unfinished script. It went something like this:

Cast: Parent - Me; Child - Tanay; Zookeeper - Ben; Assistant - Kee Young.

Child: Isn't it cool how giraffes have such long necks to reach the top tree? I wish I had a long neck so I could reach the cookies at the top of the fridge.

Parent: Yeah, that is really cool.

Zookeeper and Assistant come running in

Zookeeper: Oh no! The gorilla escaped!

Assistant: Yeah, I forgot to lock the paddock.

Here the script ended, and we were supposed to begin improvising, using the cues that they put up on the projector behind us. Cue the incredible creativity.

*a frog appears*

Tanay: Oh look! A frog ate the gorilla!

Me: Okay.

*an owl appears*

Tanay: Oh look! An owl ate the frog!

Me: It's okay, I'm sure the Zookeeper has everything under control.

Ben: Yes, I do! Good thing I have my bird-catching net ready! Hi-ya!

*a lion appears*

Tanay: Oh look! The lion ate the owl!

Me: Crap. Runs off set.

Five seconds later, I randomly come back.

*an elephant appears*

Tanay: Oh look! the elephant ate the lion! Maybe we can use the elephant's trunk to fight it.

Me: You mean it's tusks? Shut up. You don't know anything.

Tanay: You shut up, Mommy.

Ben: Uh ...

*a yak appears*

Tanay: Oh look! Wait ... what is that thing? That thing ate the elephant! Maybe we can use the elephant's tusks to fight its long horns?

Me: I don't know. It's very hairy.

Ben [under breath]: that's what she said.

Proctor: Do you know what that thing is?

Us: a yak?

Proctor: Very good. You're done.

We left, laughing and wondering if we were going to banned from the competition for having such terrible improv skills.

And if you're wondering, the answer to the puzzle was foley - the first letter of each animal they flashed on the screen.

So at 11:30 pm we decided to call it a night. We packed up our laptops, the random scraps of paper we had picked up, and walked out of the room dead tired. Kee Young headed over to the awards ceremoney, stole an unopened package of napkins, and gave them to me. Which I promptly smuggled out under my shirt, no doubt giving some people the impression that I was pregnant with a child that is shaped like a rectangular prism.

How did we do? Terribly. Just like ARML, I suppose. In the end it would've been cool to win one of the prizes, but the 13 hours I spent at CPC were awesome. I can't help but think back to the beginning, when we thought we would leave before dinner.

Time flew. It was well spent. Walking out of the classroom that I was cooped up in solving puzzles, I got the same feeling as I did whenever I left ARML or the practices. That despite my relative incompetence and general apathy towards results, I had had a good time. That I had thought until my head hurt and that I had pushed the limits of my creativity to the breaking point. That I had learned new ways to look at things and formed inside jokes and memories that will be with me as long as I can keep them.

Most of all, I realized that I had a ton of new stories. I know that very soon I'll be starting a lot of my stories with "This one time at CPC ..."

I've already started, in fact.