alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

February 2007

You might not think it particularly ambitious to clean up after a party or to assemble a bookcase, but that's because you are a human being. For a robot, performing these tasks would be a tremendous undertaking that could only result from a truly ambitious integration of many specialties within robotics and artificial intelligence. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project is exactly this kind of quest.

Led by Andrew Ng, an assistant professor of computer science, STAIR brings together specialties such as language processing, machine vision, machine learning, and decision analysis. With a breadth of technologies to cover, Ng has assembled a "dream team" of 10 robotics experts including himself. Of these, nine are featured in this month's puzzle. The tenth is consulting professor Gary Bradksi.

Directions for puzzle

In this puzzle you assume the role of STAIR (complete with a robotic arm). Your somewhat fanciful goal is to seat your creators at a lecture based on the preferences they express. When you successfully arrange the professors, 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 Marge Kastner. She'll post 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.

Those engineering alums who were lying in wait for the Puzzle to go "live" are Michael Connors, Michael Tung, Thomas Davids, and Molly White Kerr. Now, for the solvers who waited for the E-News to get out before they sprang into action, every 10th solver is listed.

"Winning" entries

  • 1) John Belsher
  • 11) Bill Kooiman
  • 21) Howard Lynch
  • 31) Ted Batey
  • 41) Eric Schmidt
  • 51) Augusto Cuba
  • 61) Angela Hockman
  • 71) Jason Wolfe
  • 81) Lance Yang
  • 91) Rachel Parke-Houben
  • 111) David Gilbert
  • 121) Andrew Narver
  • 131) Terry Weir
  • 141) David Bauman
  • 151) Laurent Desol

We'll continue to list every 10th solver, so send in your solution when you get the chance.

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles? Go to our Archive page.