How quickly can you crack the above puzzle?
If you are taking more than a few minutes, we must regretfully inform you that you just lost out in Riddle Fiddle, a puzzle competition conducted by Abacus, the Quant club of IIMA. Launched on 20th July, Riddle Fiddle was a 5 day long online battle to crack some mind-boggling puzzles like the one we have mentioned above.
The event was a huge hit – with over 200 students and IIM staff answering and fighting to be rated as the best puzzle solvers the competition turned out to be quite intense. Some participants managed to solve some puzzles in just 4 minutes after the puzzle was posted.
The participants could work on the puzzles from the convenience of their rooms, collude, Google and use whatever resources they wanted to but arrive at a solution as fast as possible to beat the others.
Over a period of 5 days, a new puzzle set comprising of 4-5 puzzles, were posted on Abacus Facebook page each day. First puzzle was posted at 10:30 pm and subsequent puzzles were posted every 5-8 min. Students had to solve the puzzle set within 1 hour, between 10:30 pm to 11:30 pm and then guess a common theme that linked all the questions of the day (the “Magic Word of the Day”). The common theme was usually something simple and known to us all, such as IIMA (day 1) or ABACUS (day 5), but it took a lot of effort and puzzle cracking skills to reach to the final theme.
The puzzles were all painstakingly designed from scratch by the Abacus team and most of them were presented with an “IIM Angle”. This made the questions fairly unGoogle-able as well. Like the one below.
Rahul Saran, Saket Kumar, Ritesh Ranjan, Sudarshan Swaminathan and Ankur Goyal were the fastest ones to solve the puzzles and guess the Magic Word of the Day on each of the five days respectively. Ankur Goyal was the only one to correctly guess magic word within just 15 seconds of final posting on the last day.
One of the reasons a lot of fachchas liked the concept of Riddle Fiddle and participated in the event was that it did not demand lengthy time commitments. The online event also managed to generate a buzz outside the campus, attracting participation from a fair number of non-campus junta. According to Abacus coordinator Priyadarshan Gupta, more such events will be held in future, utilizing social media, wherein students don’t need to depart from their busy schedules to participate in the events they like.
For more details about Abacus and the activities they conduct, you can visit their Facebook page here.
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