2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship is Open

Fortran IV writes "Registration is open until June 15 for the 2006 Google U.S. Puzzle Championship, to be held Saturday, June 17, 2006—it's 25 or so mind-bending pencil-and-paper puzzles that you have 2-1/2 very short hours to solve. The USPC is a qualifying test to choose 2 members for the U.S. team at the 2006 World Puzzle Championship to be held in Borovets, Bulgaria in October. For a mild taste of the puzzles try the 2006 Practice Test (as has been noted here in the past, if you can't get the Practice Test open you should probably give the real thing a pass!) For more of a workout the real tests for 2005 and 2004 are still available."

Oh noes

[Kelz]

Practice tests /.ed, .5KB/sec.

Note: Don't try to open the practice tests in IE/Firefox (with adobe reader), save to desktop.

Re:Oh noes

[Volanin]

Theres an extension that avoids opening PDF directly, gotta install it.

Although extensions are cool, this is overkill.
This is a configuration in the Adobe Reader for that.
Just go EDIT, PREFERENCES, INTERNET... and uncheck Display PDF in Browser.

Bandwidth issues

[Anonymous Coward]

I have done this for a couple years now. Being /.ed now is an annoyance, on puzzle day I couldn't get the password for over 20 minutes, then at the end, you can't submit your answers because everyone else was also trying. In a timed contest, this can really mess you up. Lets hope between now and the 17th they get their network issues resolved.

Hmm

[Oopsallberries]

Wouldn't open for me after I downloaded it. Weird.

They should recruit at MIT Mystery Hunt

[JelloJoe]

One of the more hardcore puzzling events each year is held at MIT. I competed in it this year and had a blast. For more info, go here http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/ [mit.edu]

OT: Wanted: Lightweight PDF viewer for Firefox

[martyb]

This is a configuration in the Adobe Reader for that. Just go EDIT, PREFERENCES, INTERNET... and uncheck Display PDF in Browser.

Thanks for that! Just updated settings on my system. BUT, I woul dlove to have a lightweight (i.e. small and quick-to-load) alternative to Adobe Acrobat for viewing (and printing) PDF files. I'e grown accustomed to some of the quirks of the user interface, my main complaint with Acrobat is its slow startup speed. That, and at least on my system, Acrobat 6.0 has a working set of about 35 MB. (As reported by sysinternals.com's amazingly powerful Process Explorer [sysinternals.com] utility.

I did some cursory googling a week or so ago, but couldn't find what I was looking for. It looks like ghostscript [ghostscript.com] might be useful for this? Has anyone tried it?

Sample quiz question.

[babbling]

Is the difficulty similar to the difficulty of the real quiz? It doesn't seem that difficult.

Q1 is just a Sudoku that doesn't seem too hard.
Q2 can be solved with matrices.
Q3 involves finding the features easiest to compare and comparing all tiles with that feature (eg. one groundhog, two groundhogs, three groundhogs), comparing them, and then crossing out tiles that are definitely not similar to any others.

Mirrors

[pojo]

Mirrordot [mirrordot.org] has the test mirrored.

The test [mirrordot.org], password: apple.
The instructions [mirrordot.org], password: grail.