alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

Special Announcement

Stanford Engineering Alumni Program Honorary Degrees in Puzzology are hereby awarded to our most diligent solvers!

July 2008

Stanford's most identifiable places are Hoover Tower and the Main Quad, including Memorial Church. Stanford Engineering used to have its own corner of the quad (now we are building a new quad). Lest we lose our connection to the quad, we thought we'd celebrate it with this month's puzzle.

Kakuro on the Quad

Kakuro is a number puzzle that is sort of a cross between sudoku and a crossword puzzle. In the grid below, which is drawn to resemble a very low-resolution map of the Main Quad (Memorial Court on top, Memorial Church on the bottom), your job is to fill in numbers that will add up to specific sums. The sums are denoted by the small numbers in the gray squares. Those numbers refer to sums that either extend directly below them, to their right, or both (gray boxes with a slash). For example, in the upper left-hand corner, there is a gray box with "18/3." That means the sum to the right should add up to 18 and the sum below should add up to 3.

There are a few rules to keep in mind: 1) Only use the numbers 1-9 to fill in the grid (i.e. no double-digit numbers allowed). 2) Zero is not allowed in a proper Kakuro game so the ones used here are all provided. Put another way, you will not have to fill in any zeroes yourself. 3) No digit will repeat in a sum (you can't add two 5s to make 10). 4) There are no single-box sums (i.e. do not try to fill in "16" to the right of the gray "16" box in the upper right corner.

Anyway, to show that you have successfully completed the puzzle, make sure to e-mail Marge Kastner with the number of 2s that occupy white squares when the puzzle is done (those provided plus those you filled in).

A good way to start is to try the top middle region of six boxes (Memorial Court). Sure, it's isolated from the rest of the puzzle, but it will get your summing and logic juices flowing...

July Kakuro Puzzle

Our registrar has suffered a fit of confusion, brought on by the desire to be perfectly accurate in conferring the June 2008 degrees -- and possibly the early onset of EDAY. Don't lose faith. If you solved more than five puzzles from June 2007 to May 2008, you'll be on our degree list sometime in the fairly near future. Here are the first 10 solvers for this June and every 10th solver after that. Keep your solutions coming in, they all count for the June 2009 degrees.

"Winning" entries

A very special thanks to Mark Perkins for suggesting a puzzle for next month. And to those solvers, mostly listed below, who pointed out duplicate answers. Sorry about that. We're listing everyone who sent in a solution over the long weekend. This was a hard one, congratulations all.

  • 1) Florian Gicquel
  • 2) Michael Connors
  • 3) Nick Baxter
  • 4) Linda Knudsen
  • 5) Kenichi Futamura
  • 6) Peter German
  • 7) Darren Jones
  • 8) Kevin Shen
  • 9) Paul Swenson
  • 10) Eric Juline
  • 11) Julie Newell
  • 12) Kai Yu
  • 13) Edward Wilson
  • 14) Mike Medin
  • 15) Mark Perkins
  • 16) Philip James
  • 17) Jeff Blohm
  • 18) Rick Doherty
  • 19) Jim Hartley
  • 20) Scott Mosher
  • 21) Anthony Vitale
  • 22) Jason Wolfe
  • 23) Nelson Davis
  • 24) Trajan Unger
  • 25) Robert Filman
  • 26) Brad Davids
  • 27) Eylon Stroh
  • 28) Emerson Swan
  • 29) Jasna Ristic-Djurovic
  • 30) Patrick Toolis
  • 31) Wade Powell
  • 32) Mike Harris

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