alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

March 2007

Let's face it. Who doesn't want a robot who can clean up the house after a party, find a book you left lying around somewhere and perform other mundane tasks? If you were disabled this kind of service might be outright essential. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Robot (STAIR) project is designed to build a robot with the general intelligence to be an effective helper for a wide variety of tasks.

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. It also brings together 10 robotics experts. Of these, nine are again featured in this month's puzzle. The tenth is consulting professor Gary Bradksi.

Directions for puzzle

In this puzzle you resume the role of STAIR, as it seats its creators at a lecture based on the preferences they express. This time, however, they are telling you where they don't want to be.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.

There were three who sent in the answer before the first E-News hit Cyber Space. They are Rachel Parke-Houben, Michael Tung and Rick Doherty.

"Winning" entries

  • 1) Michael Connors
  • 11) Cherise Khaund
  • 21) Shehzaad Nakhoda
  • 31) Matthew Henry
  • 41) Joshua seifert
  • 51) Jack Mulder
  • 61) Kahlil Fitzerald
  • 71) Brian Kaiser
  • 81) Marius Meissner
  • 91) Rene Patnode
  • 101) Bernardo Abis
  • 121) Mike O'Neal
  • 131) John Clapp
  • 141) Anand Rangarajan
  • 151) Kyle Bruck
  • 161) John Ang

If you haven't sent in your answer, keep on trying to solve this month's puzzle. We'll keep posting every tenth answer as long as you keep sending them in.

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