alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

February 2006

We're back with an all-new puzzle inspired by the school's plans to build a "green" residence hall on campus. There are several goals for the project, but primary among them is to demonstrate that environmentally sustainable living can also be comfortable living (yes, the showers can still be hot and the drinks can still be cold). Faculty and students in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering are the driving forces behind the project. They expect the dorm to generate as much electricity as it uses and to generate zero net carbon emissions. When complete the dorm will include extensive systems to monitor resource use and will include classroom space so that the dorm can be an exciting new facility for demonstrating and teaching principles of sustainability.

Directions for Puzzle:

One of the most intriguing ideas in the green dorm project is the idea of reusing and recycling water. There are several ways this could happen and we have made one of them into the premise for this month's puzzle (we'll show you another idea next month). Your job is to route water coming from the utility in the bottom left to the sink for drinking or washing. Then you will route it from the sink to the toilet, where (after some on-site filtering that you don't need to do here) it could be used to flush. Buildings that allow for water reuse could save gallons of water in the future.

Upon successful completion, a "secret word" will be revealed. For fun we will post (below) the names of ten alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member David Orenstein. We'll post winning entry number 1, 11, 21, 31, 41, etc. up to 91.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

"Winning" entries

  • 1)Ron Dotson (PhD 1975 AA)
  • 11)David Reid (MS 1966 CEM)
  • 21)James Bertsch (BS 1983 ME)
  • 31)Sally Marrack (BS 1993 Product Design)
  • 41)Don Parent (MS 1980 ME)
  • 51)Alex Starns (BS 2004 ME)
  • 61)Bryan Chan (BS 1994 Biology, MD 1999)
  • 71)Joseph C. Koo (MS 2005 EE)
  • 81)John Clapp (BS, MS 1984 EE)
  • 91)Rob Norwood (BS 1991, MS 1992, PhD 1998 all in EE)
Try your hand at all our puzzles in our puzzle archive.