Ch^H^H...Train of Thought

Shinteki

Oh man, I am so tired.

Yesterday, I participated with Albert, Jason, and Jason in a scavenger hunt/puzzle solving competition/race called Shinteki. If you've ever played "The Go Game" or watched "Amazing Race" on TV, it's a lot like those two games except the field is Silicon Vallley, not the world, and the events at each destination take so much more brains than the entire cast and crew of any FOX reality show combined.

Team Shock & Awe, that's us, got 505/1000 points total. That puts us at 2nd to last place and within an arms reach of the about the next several teams. There were 23 teams, I think.

It started at Stanford's stadium at 9:30am with a relay race where we had to find these little colored balls with our team's name on it and a year. We then had to go bring them to one of five people with city tags on their shirts, matching up with the city name of the summer Olympics of that year. If we got it right, they give us a sticker. If we get it wrong, they toss the ball back into the pile of balls on the field and we try again. We at least got that one done fairly quickly.

We then had to drive to Ikea, find the next clue, and solve it. I think a lot of the shoppers were confused to find teams of people running around the store and using the furniture to solve a puzzle involving a deck of cards. They got permission from Ikea to let us lounge around and use their furniture for workspace. The table and chairs we picked were pretty nice. Somebody actually walked up to us and asked if we knew anything about the chair he was eyeing.

After that, we drove off to Shoreline Lake. There we had to take a paddle boat, (I'm beginning to see where the $275 team entry fee went to.) paddle into the middle of the lake, pick up a clue in a Wheaties box, and then paddle back. It was a crossword that lead to a binary encoded message, and then to the clue telling us the next event was at Memorial Park.

The event at Memorial Park was pretty hard, and without giving it away, involved bit streams and printer technology. If you saw the solution, you'd understand even if you knew nothing about printer technology.

The funny thing was, in the Ikea one, we thought about all sorts of ways that might lead to an answer, but missed the obvious. The Shoreline lake one ended up using the obvious one that we thought up in the previous, but along the way we did think of another idea. That idea turned out to be the solution to the next one, but as expected we totally didn't think of using it again. That pissed us off so much :P

You might be wondering how scoring 23 teams of 4 was done. Afterall, supposedly the fastest team finished at 6:00pm, while we took up until the limit of ~10:30pm.

It's a Palm Zire. They call it ZEUS, short for Zire Electronic Unbiased Scorekeeper. Every team has one and it's used to supply hints and keep track of the score of the team. It also tells us the time data for how long we spent on an event but that's not used in scoring. If you get stuck, you can buy hints using the points you would have gotten from that event if you finished. Each event is 100 points, so if you buy a 5 point hint, you'd get 95 if you finished. It won't subtract from your actual score unless you finish the event. We bought a lot of hints but we didn't ever buy all the hints for any event. We're not that crappy :P

Anyways, here's a little more about the other puzzles:
5) Mad libs. Go go gadget Google "anagram solver"! To get the booklet, we had to hike up to the top of the wildlife preserve and get to Hunter's Point. We figured out so much of it, that it pissed us off to have to buy so many hints. The one adverb we didn't get was "alphabetically" and no amount of typing "easy", "simply" and other stuff into the thesaurus would have saved us. Since there wasn't a designated field, we went to the Cupertino Library's Teen Study Area. (dude, they had some major renovation since I was last there, what kind of library gets their own 8x10 foot window into a giant fishtank?) We finished it just as the library closed at 6pm. There was some chinese festival going on in the area near us so the whole place looked like Taiwan.
6) Okay, make a bridge out of straws and masking tape that holds a 1kg brick between two little stool thingies 25cm apart for 10 seconds. Yeah, we're engineers, so we thought this should have been our forte. Except none of us were Civil or MechEs. Long story short, we took 60+ minutes to design and build our bridge. We expected it to collapse fairly soon after the 10 seconds necessary. Instead we were one of two groups who had one that could hold 2 bricks and didn't have to use points to buy additional straws or masking tape. Totally over engineered. Took too much time to design. But we're proud that we got the full 100 points on this one :).
7) This one involved semaphores and a fountain. We couldn't do it because we missed the 7:15pm deadline. The deadline was probably because after 7 it started getting dark and cold, and getting wet would have been real bad.
8) Throw the frisbee into the buckets to get 100 points. We got 175, the highest possible. But that didn't give us any points, just the clue for the puzzle. This time, it really was a jigsaw puzzle. It's all colorful and we decided that we'll skip this one since we thought it would have taken us too long even with the hints. So we bought out all the hints and skipped it. (seeing the hints was a requirement to skipping)
9) At the "Olympic Wannabes" statues, they had an audio cd with a bunch of songs on them. We had to name the songs and then figure out how to get the solution from those names. Google came in real handy with the lyrics but even then we couldn't find all the songs. Thankfully, the hints we bought were enough to let us solve it without the last song. (some jazzy one where you couldn't hear the words very well, heck, for the longest time Jason Chen thought the guy was a girl.)
10) Ever played Boggle? It's a lot like that. 12 cards with related words. Find the category. Use those to decode instructions and generate one last one. 10 more minutes, and we would have solved it. Sucks to run out of time.

So that's how we spent Saturday. All the teams met up to see the final scores and pick up some goodies and return the Zires at a bar in Menlo Park. Heh, we had a much harder time finding the bar than the puzzle destinations because we were so tired. But it was fun! Gotta get the pictures from the others too...

Posted by hachu at May 8, 2005 12:04 PM