Super duper tired today.
Over the weekend, from Saturday 5pm to Sunday 1pm, I was involved in an island wide puzzle-solving game. For some of the clues, we needed the internet, so we tried to use our laptops to connect to the net. Looking for a place that had wireless@sg coverage was hard. Finding one with decent connection speeds was even harder. In the end, we gave up and just used a mobile phone to connect to the net. Fortunately, Google had decent mobile search and we managed to find all the information we needed.
My team came in third because we didn’t manage to solve the bonus clue which would have given us a time reduction of two hours. The team that included one of my JC classmates came in second. That classmate of mine is like the smartest guy around so I guess I don’t feel that bad losing to his team. His team got the answer for the clue at this station which we were stuck at for like 2 hours in a matter of minutes.
We had to get the name of a location from this set of 15 words:
1.Jackie Chan
2.Ronan Keating
3.Christina Aguilera
4.Mulan
5.Traffic
6.Notting Hill
7.Hamburger Hill
8.Lessons Learnt
9.Hall of mirrors
10.Opium War
11.Incident Angle
12.Hallucigination
13.Plate Tectonics
14.Chengdu
15.Bishan
How many of you know about this place “Reflections @ Bukit Chandu”? Well, that is the answer. We didn’t see the connection. My classmate’s team did. In like 1/8 of the time we did. Sigh.
Anyway, that place is damn nice. There is a canopy walk to that place from Kent Ridge Park and I’m definitely going back there once I have the time.
After the game, my classmate was trying to explain how his team solved the bonus clue. I was too tired to register everything he said, but it did feel sucky not to be able to see the pattern in the numbers for the clue. Patterns. Problem solving has a lot to do with being able to observe patterns and applying them. And instinct is important too. A couple of times, we had a hunch about how to solve the clue but didn’t pursue the initial hunch and over thought the problem. In the end, we realised more often than not, the inital hunch was more than just that - it was a brief flash of insight that we failed to seize because we didn’t realise its worth.
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