HCII Team Takes Second Place in Microsoft’s College Puzzle Challenge
News
For ten uninterrupted hours on Saturday, April 9, teams of college students raced to solve challenging puzzles that tested their skills in computer engineering, computer science and mathematics as part of the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge.
Held annually, the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge takes place simultaneously on college campuses across the country. This year, 430 teams solved a series of puzzles and metapuzzles all designed to recover a fictitious airline's passenger bags that had mysteriously been lost in time. Teams were ranked on how quickly they solved puzzles and the total number of puzzles they solved.
At the end of the day, the HCII's Human Puzzle Interaction team took second place at Carnegie Mellon's competition, and fifth overall. Team members included Ph.D. students Dan Tasse, Kelly Rivers, Erik Harpstead and Robert Xiao.
CMU took first place in the challenge overall, with four of its teams ranking in the competition's top 10 slots.
Learn more about the competition on the Microsoft College Puzzle Challenge website.
Story by Aisha Rashid (DC 2019)
The Human Puzzle Interaction team, pictured above without Tasse, also won CMU's SCS puzzlehunt earlier this year.