Stanford Engineering Puzzle

April 2008

The next two months are Scott Kim's official encore as the Stanford Engineering puzzle designer. We thank him for giving us month after month of fun gameplay, uniquely tailored to the Stanford Engineering community.

Community, however, is the operative word as we look ahead. We are committed to keeping the puzzle feature going, and so (in the spirit of Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, and other "Web 2.0" commuity-content sites) we are throwing open puzzle development to our brilliant alumni community. Send us your puzzle ideas and we'll share the best of them with your fellow alumni to enjoy (with proper credit, of course). Meanwhile, here at puzzle central, we'll keep churning out the ideas, too. Send your ideas to David Orenstein.

Anyway, this month's puzzle is dedicated to all the hard-working students, faculty, and staff who work on wireless communications. These include folks such as electrical engineering Professors Donald Cox, Andrea Goldsmith, Arogyaswami Paulraj, and Balaji Prabhakar. Check out their research by clicking on their names. Directions for puzzle In this puzzle, your job is to infer the location of wireless transmitters on the campus by placing detectors on the map. This is somewhat like sniffing for wi-fi networks or testing for cell phone signal strength. For fun we will post (below) the names of alumni who successfully e-mail the secret word to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post the first 10 correct responders and every tenth right answerer after that.

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

All entries, listed here or not, will be entered in the "Alumni Permanent Record" and count towards Honorary Degrees in Puzzology next June. To check out the degree earners for June 2007, please see the Puzzology page. Every 10th solver will be listed until the last weekend of the month, when the final entries will be awarded the "Weekend of Fame" before the next puzzle page is posted. So keep your solutions coming in.

"Winning" entries

1) Michael Connors
2) Jasna Ristic-Djurovic
3) Archanna Srinivasan
4) Mark Gundersen
5) Wah Kwok
6) Daniel Gabay
7) Jock Mackinlay
8) Robert Ellgas
9) Jack Chou
10) Ed Smith
20) Karen Murphy
30) Jim Mulready
40) Stephanie Sud
50) Jay Simon
60) Derrick Blohm
70) Scott Seligman
80) Oscar Brooks
90) Tony Lillios
100) Christine Jacobs
110 Larry Willard
120 Ben Carter
130 Kevin Koehler
140 Doug Yerger
150 Robert Siston
160 Sophia Traweek
170 Jim Hartley
180 Phil Konkel
190 Jonathan Stevens
200 Nick Baxter
210

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