The Puzzle Hunt Club is a group of TS-ers that write and test puzzles for the annual TS Puzzle Hunt; a venue for teams of employees to compete to see who can solve puzzles the fastest while (optionally) eating pizza and drinking beer. Most recently, the Puzzle Hunt Club prowess has gone external with a series of monthly puzzles featured on Linkedin. Did you have a chance to solve them all? Below we dive deeper into the puzzles and solutions from Q1.
January: Pizza Points
by Allen Chen
You were looking back at some old memories from puzzle hunts at Two Sigma. Of course, you kept careful logs of all your data from each one, trying to answer the question of if eating more pizza means you can solve puzzles faster. Sadly, the data seems to show the opposite, with a correlation of 95% between meta-puzzle solve time and pizza eaten, but no matter.
After taking one moment, and then a second moment to look at the results again, there seems to be some other pattern in this data!
The Solution
Step 1: Finding the First Moment
To find the first moment (mean) we averaged the two columns for each team and then turned each mean into a letter where A=1, B=2, C=3, and so on. This gave us: T, T, L, I, F, E, A
Step 2: Finding the Second Moment
To find the second moment (the variance) with just two numbers, we can find how far each number is from the mean, square it, and average those. We turned the rounded results into letters using the same method. This gave us: M, A, W, O, S, I, G
Step 3: Putting It Together
T,T,L,I,F,E,A,M,A,W,O,S,I,G = LIFE AT TWO SIGMA
February: Pizza Puzzler
by Andrew Bolin
Rachel is ordering pizza for seven people. She had written down who ordered what but accidentally spilled coffee on her list. She can’t remember exactly what everyone ordered, but she thinks she can piece it together based on what she recalls about everyone’s preferences.
She knows that:
– Emily and Owen are vegetarians.
– Yasmine thinks plain Cheese is boring.
– Nathan likes the classics and ordered either Cheese, Pepperoni, or Margherita.
– Emily hates onions.
– Wendy doesn’t believe pineapple belongs on a pizza.
– She herself ordered Cheese.
– Kevin always wants a pizza with meat on it.
Can you help Rachel reconstruct her list AND figure out where to get the best pizza?
The Solution
Step 1: Figure out who ordered Sausage
We notice that #7 has a visible letter “n” at the end of the name. Looking at our seven people, three names end in “n”: Owen, Nathan, and Kevin.
– Owen is vegetarian, so he wouldn’t order Sausage.
– Nathan only orders “classics” (Cheese, Pepperoni, or Margherita), and Sausage isn’t one of those.
– Kevin always wants meat, and Sausage fits! So Kevin has Sausage (#7).
Step 2: Place Rachel and the vegetarians
Rachel tells us she herself ordered Cheese, so Rachel has Cheese (#6).
Emily and Owen are vegetarians, so they can only eat Margherita, Peppers and Onions, or Cheese. Since Rachel already has Cheese, Emily and Owen must have Margherita and Peppers and Onions. But Emily hates onions, so Emily has Margherita (#2) and Owen has Peppers and Onions (#5).
Step 3: Narrow down the remaining three
Nathan, Yasmine, and Wendy still need pizzas. The remaining options are Pepperoni (#1), BBQ Chicken (#3), and Hawaiian (#4). Nathan likes “the classics” and would only order Cheese, Pepperoni, or Margherita. Cheese and Margherita are taken, so Nathan has Pepperoni (#1). Wendy doesn’t believe pineapple belongs on pizza, ruling out Hawaiian. That means Wendy has BBQ Chicken (#3) and Yasmine has Hawaiian (#4).
Step 4: The Final List
Step 5: The Meta-Answer
But wait! The puzzle also asked: Where can you get the best pizza? Read the first letters of the names from top to bottom: The answer is New York!
March: Resume Play
by Julia Meinwald
We’re looking for talent to join us at Two Sigma! Are you an outlier in a field? Perhaps at TS you can find a team where you’d fit right in. Take a look at these resumés and see if you can single out a message from our recruiting team.
The Solution
Each of the 10 resumes has 10 categories with information relevant to this puzzle. You can create a matrix like this:
Each resume section has a uniting category, as follows:
– Objective: words with silent letters
– Special Skills: palindomes
– Responsibilities: words for groups of birds
– Employer: words with homophones
– First Name: Spices and herbs
– Role: Rhymes
– Reference: Academy Award for Best Picture winners
– Award: bands
– Street: popular associations with numbers
– College: US presidents
For each category, nine of the ten resumes correctly fulfil it, and one resume is an outlier. Each resume has an outlier in one and only one category. If you look at the first letter of each exception word (highlighted below), you’ll see H, N, T, S, I, I, G, S, I, R which rearranges to TS IS HIRING!
