3rd Annual Microsoft College Puzzle Day

I saw a mention of the Microsoft College Puzzle Day event on Scoble’s blog and clicked through. Wow, the program has really grown.

Niraj, Evan, Lee, and I coordinated and ran the first puzzle day at University of Michigan in the fall of 2003. As noted in a blog post by Dan Justin, the first year, we made some mistakes. Last year, we ran the event again with 3 schools teaming up to do a inter-campus event (UMich, U of Toronto, and Carnegie Mellon participated).

Obviously, I’ve since left Microsoft (Niraj wasn’t even @ MSFT for the 2nd annual puzzle day), but the event rolls on!

This year, they have not 3 but 8 schools in the fray. Columbia, Cornell, GA Tech, MIT, UMich, USC, UT, and U of Toronto (sorry Canadians, but Texas gets to be called UT in the states 😛 ). Wow, this is going to be quite the event.

Which reminded me of the t-shirts I designed for the previous years events. In puzzle day fashion, the back of each t-shirt included a puzzle. The first year’s puzzle was relatively easy, last year’s puzzle was way too hard (oops). For you puzzle fans, here they are:

(You can click through to Flickr for full resolution photos) The black one on the left is the shirt from 2003 and the one on the right is the shirt from 2004. When you look at the ’03 shirt from afar, you can see the it says “ALLNIGHTAFFAIR”, the name of the event. But when you look up close, you realize it’s made up of 0s and 1s. The ’04 shirt actually had a printing error. The dots that are clear were supposed to be completely filled in black. As for the puzzle, it was really hard to solve; I’ll give you a hint though, Puzzle Royale was a casino theme 🙂

If you’re a college student at one of the 8 schools listed above, and you like puzzles (and you want a job at Microsoft heh heh), go to the site and sign up a team. If nothing else, you get a free t-shirt and free food – the fundamentals of any successful college event 😉

UPDATE: Check this, they are giving each member of the winning team their very own XBox 360 – a week before it’s released! That’s would motivate me to participate just on the potential ebay value of the system alone…

UPDATE 2: A Canadian friend has told me that they don’t call University of Toronto “UT”; he says they typically say “U of T” or “UTornoto”

UPDATE 3: Oops, the guy who posted about the puzzle day was actually Justin, not Dan.