Stanford Engineering Puzzle
December 2006
Even when a kidney patient has a willing donor, arranging a transplant is not a simple matter. Often donors and their intended recipients are incompatible. The next step for doctors is to try to find a donor-recipient pair that is compatible with the first pair. Then they could swap. But even then it becomes complicated. When one looks at several such pairs there is a way to maximize the number of possible donations. Anything less denies someone a lifesaving new kidney.
Alumna Sommer Gentry, now a professor of applied mathematics at the U.S. Naval Academy, and her transplant surgeon husband are tackling this problem by creating a system called Optimized Match that can analyze donation pairs and find the maximum number of matches among them.
Directions for puzzle
In the puzzle your goal is to find the maximum and minimum number of possible matches between patient-donor pairs. Click on lines to select matches, but think carefully about the implications of each move. Each pair can be a potential party to many matches, but can only be involved in one actual match. When you successfully maximize and then minimize the matches, 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.
"Winning" entries
Okay, you wonderful and savy puzzle solvers, 234 total solvers as of 10 a.m. this morning. With seven of you solving it BEFORE the E-News was sent! The seven who have telepathic powers are: Navid Yazdani, David Hertzog, Dan Rezza, Don Bentley, Kevin Koehler, Kristin Granlund and Viren Bhanot..Now, for the rest of the solvers, the E-News is sent by a server, which doesn't understand your need to get it quickly. It arrives at its various destinations over the course of several hours. So as not to punish the solvers at the end of the line, we'll list every 20th correct answer. If you haven't sent in your answer, don't get discouraged, you still have a chance to see your name on this page. We'll continue to list the 20th solver as the answers come in.
- 1) Jeff Blohm
- 21) Steve Francis
- 41) Angela Hockman
- 61) David Havelin
- 81) Molly Story
- 101) Richard Stephenson
- 121) Cezar Petriuc
- 141) Ken Carrizosa
- 161) Victor Wong
- 181) Rachel Parke-Houben
- 201) Laurent Delsol
- 221) Julie Newell
- 241) Sabina Alistar
Facebook
Twitter
RSS