alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

April 2006

Call us trendy with a twist because this month's puzzle is a variant on the popular puzzle Sudoku. Traditional Sudoku requires players to arrange the nine groupings of nine distinct tiles so that every column, row, and grouping has each of the nine kinds of tiles. But this is Stanford Engineering Soduko, so in this case there are six tiles: four represent the school's strategic priorities (Bioengineering, Environment and Energy, Information Technology, and Nanoscience and Nanotechnology) and two represent the school's two institutes (the Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Design).

Directions for puzzle:

To play Stanford Engineering Soduko, you need to put each of the six unique letters in each row, column, and region (marked off by the thick blue lines). A few starter tiles have been placed for you (the star pertains to hint 2). Upon successful completion, a "secret word" will be revealed. For fun we will post (below) the names of 10 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) Joe Aizpuru (BS 1986 EE)
  • 11) Wade Powell (MS 1999 IEEM)
  • 21) Ankita Shah (MS 2002 ChemE)
  • 31) Rick Schumacher (BS 1985 IE)
  • 41) Jack Chou (BS 1995 CS)
  • 51) David Gluss (PhD 1985 EE)
  • 61) Olivia Williamson (MS MS&E 2005)
  • 71) Eric Van Os (MS 2003 MS&E)
  • 81) Lacey Anne Edwards (MS 2003 MS&E)
  • 91)Tony Lillios (BS 1991 EE, MS 1992 ME)

Try your hand at our other puzzles in the puzzle archive.