We're looking forward to seeing you this weekend! This post is intended to help you approach the Puzzle Round and give some tips on effective puzzle-solving strategies.
Round Format
The Puzzle Round is a 75-minute team-based test with puzzles designed to promote lateral thinking and deductive reasoning. There is a 15-minute reading period for you to learn the puzzle rules and try out some small examples. Understanding the rules well is extremely important for solving puzzles, so we strongly recommend reading the rules carefully and doing all examples. After the reading period, you will have 60 minutes to solve the puzzles.
Strategy Tips
The puzzles will be divided into variants which all build on the rules of the base puzzle type. Here are some things to keep in mind:
- While puzzles within variants are sorted by difficulty, your team may find some variants easier than others — we encourage you to try puzzles in all the different variants.
- There will be a selection of challenge puzzles at the end of the test. They may be attractive due to their high point values, but attempting them before completing the easier puzzles in a variant will be very difficult.
- We think prioritizing puzzles with lower point values is the best strategy because these puzzles tend to be much easier and faster to solve than challenge puzzles.
Understanding the Rules
Every puzzle will have exactly one solution, and reaching that solution will not require any guesswork or assumptions. We have prepared walkthrough videos demonstrating the process of using logical deductions to solve puzzles with no guessing, and they will be posted to our YouTube channel soon.
If you reach a contradiction, make sure you are properly applying every rule to different parts of the puzzle. No partial credit will be given, so even a minor mistake in your understanding of the rules could be extremely problematic. We recommend double-checking all of your solutions to make sure they follow all the rules.
Preparation
Learning to solve a new kind of puzzle can be challenging. We think the best way to prepare for the Puzzle Round is to practice!
- Our website has an archive of previous Puzzle Rounds that are great for practice.
- We also have a website where you can solve last year's Puzzle Round online!
- Recent Puzzle Rounds most accurately reflect the style and difficulty of this year's puzzle round, but any practice is good practice!
- Another important thing to prepare ahead of time is a strategy for dividing the puzzles with your team. There are many different ways to do this, and we generally recommend some amount of divide-and-conquer and checking each others' work.
Have Fun!
Don't forget to have fun! Just like the rest of BmMT, our goal with the Puzzle Round is to give you something interesting to think about. If you find yourself getting stuck or frustrated with a puzzle, take a step back! Talk it out with a teammate, or take a look at a different puzzle instead. We hope you enjoy the round and come out of it having explored something new.
Feel free to email us at team@berkeley.mt if you have questions about the Puzzle Round or any other aspect of BmMT. See you soon!
