College Puzzle Challenge

Team Martin returned to the puzzle challenge with a slightly new lineup. Replacing Michelle and Joyce were Clement and Rachel, both strategically drafted into the team. If you recall last year, we got off to a slow start, getting nothing for hours before Michelle finally got a puzzle. We sat near the bottom of the standings half way into the competition before reeling off a string of puzzles to zoom into the top 10. We finished well. This year, the experience of Patrick and icky helped us early on. We quickly jumped into the lead (at one point we were leading the entire field) and never slipped out of the top 20 overall and top 3 for UofT. We hung in there most of the night, with other groups working around us rooting us on. One guy offered to get us food so we wouldn't have to stop working to go get the pizza. In the end, we hung on to 2nd place and each won a $100 gift certificate to best buy. Very impressed. We were so close to solving one more puzzle, which would have gotten us to tops at UofT (same number of puzzles solved but we would have won based on more bonus points from solving puzzles among the 3 fastest teams). Only 1 team (MIT) ended up getting the final puzzle this year, which was insanely difficult.