Revenge of the Brackets

 Yes, it's been a busy weekend of competition - good thing we've got an extra hour today so we can fit it all in! Yesterday afternoon it was the Microsoft Excel World Championship last 128 and last 64. The two rounds took place one after the other, and everyone was told to complete both tasks, even if you thought you'd done badly on the first one, because the results wouldn't be announced until after both were finished.

Which turned out to be advice I was in need of following, because I did terribly on the first task. Here's the theme of the puzzles:

General Instructions:

You have just joined university and made 50 new close friends.  Your new friends haven't all met each other, and would like to understand the statistics on the relationships between them so they can form cliques more easily in the coming days.

By analysing your social media site, FaceWorkbook, you have built up a matrix of which pairings are friends and close friends with each other (as found on the Network tab). In all the questions, someone's close friends are also considered their friends.

If someone makes a social media post, it is seen by their friends and the friends of their close friends.

Please answer the questions below, based on the friendship status of your new friends. There are 5 levels of increasing difficulty available in this competition task.

So we've got a grid of fifty people and which of them each one is two different kinds of friendly with, and it's a question of counting and matching to answer the questions. Which should be easy, but I got all kinds of mixed up with it, and also lost track of time (I was thinking 5:30 as the cut-off point, and forgot I'd started as soon as I got the spreadsheet rather than waiting till 5:00 to begin, so I'd used the half hour maximum time before I realised). And I ended up with an atrocious score of 124, which turns out to be not quite the worst anyone managed, but pretty close to it.

But I went on with the last-64 task anyway, and that was a lot more fun! 

You are secretly communicating in the classroom with your friend by passing notes. Unfortunately, recently your teacher intercepted a note in which you confessed cheating on the latest Geography test. Oops! To make sure that never happens again, you and your friend devised a way to communicate without a third person being able to read the messages.

The basic idea is to offset a certain number of letters. For example, an 'a' offset 10 places becomes a 'k'. A 'z' offset 1 place becomes a 'a'. Capitals stay capitals, so a 'Y' offset 4 places becomes a 'C'. All characters that are not letters are unaffected, so spaces remain spaces and dots remain dots.

The levels are in order of increasing difficulty. The first two levels do not include spaces, nor capitals. Level three includes both of them. Level four and five use a different algorithm, in which the offset is not constant.

Decoding messages - which can be tricky with Excel, if you have to split text into individual letters, and distinguish between lower and upper case (which some Excel formulas do and some don't). But it was fun to do, especially since all the secret messages turned out to relate to Sherlock Holmes - the puzzle-writer is obviously a fan of the books rather than the TV shows, so we're definitely on the same wavelength there. Not that you needed to know the books to decode the messages, obviously, but maybe it gave me a more positive mental attitude, because I got a great score of 555 on this one, which would have won a fair few last-64 matches, including the one in my bracket!

But sadly, since I didn't win the last-128 match, that was the end of the competition for me - and you'll just have to take my word for it that I did get 555 in the next round, because first-round losers' results don't show up on the website. I did, though, I promise!

It's too bad I wasn't in the morning session instead of the afternoon one - they had different puzzles, for obvious reasons, and just look what the last-64 task was for them!

Othello is a board game played between two players, Black and White. The game is played on an 8x8 board with reversible pieces (black on one side and white on the other), and a piece may change colour after it has been placed.

The board starts off as shown to the right, with two black and two white pieces in the centre. The players then take turns placing a token of their own colour on the board and capturing one or more pieces of their opponent's colour.

A player can play a piece in a position if:

1. That position is empty before their move; and

2. Adding the new piece completes a straight line in one direction (horizontal, vertical, or diagonal) where both ends are a piece of the colour just played, and all the squares in between are of the opponent's colour (no blanks).

After the move, all the pieces of the opponents colour on the lines described in (2) are changed to the player's colour.

For example, the second board to the right shows the configuration in Example 3:

● A1 is not a valid move for white, because the only adjacent black pieces (down column A) do not have another white piece on the other side.

● B1 is a valid move for white, because it completes two lines (horizontal from B1 to D1, and diagonal from B1 to D3) with white at both ends and black in the middle. The black pieces in C1 and C2 are then captured, i.e. turned white.

● C1 is not a valid move for white, because it is already occupied.

Note these are not complete rules of Othello, but they are the only ones needed for these questions.

Now there, being a veteran Othello player, I might really have had an advantage over someone who's not familiar with the game! Although the questions were more about assembling a board layout presented in a strange way and using Excel formulas to answer abstract questions about it, rather than choosing good moves, but even so, I would have been excited to be presented with that task!

As it happens, the World Othello Championship, which I'm also not good enough to qualify for, is happening right now in Paris! After two days of swiss competition, Team Britain (Imre Leader, David Hand, Guy Plowman) came joint fourth overall (after Japan, Finland and Switzerland), but no British representative in the finals today.

As I write this, the semi-finals (Kento Urano vs Katie Pihlajapuro, Arthur Juigner v Michele Borassi) are happening, and Kento is clearly the man in form this year, unbeaten while everyone else was taking points off each other.

Rémi Tastet, who beat me at the MSO when I was all chuffed at having beaten his dad in the previous round, is in with a shot at the junior championship. I really should see if I can qualify for this event again some time...

But this morning, I had the last round of qualifying for the African-European Open Memory League Championship, pitting me against Ewelina Preś in what was always going to be a tricky competition.

She chose Names for the first discipline, which of course everyone does against me because I'm so bad at it, and won comfortably. So I chose Cards for the next, which I do always think of as one I should be winning, but my brain wasn't quite in top gear and the first three pairs of cards took too much thinking about, before I clicked into top speed. I was intending to get under 25 seconds, but it ended up as 27.78, and Ewelina was faster.

What is the world coming to, when someone can memorise a pack of cards in 27 seconds and that's still not good enough to win? I'm getting too old for this. So anyway, she chose Words next, and I really do need to recapture some good form in this - I got a terrible 31, and lost to Ewelina's 39, but if I'd been on the kind of form where I do 40 consistently I could have made a real contest of this.

3-0 down and unlikely to be staging a heroic comeback, I wasn't sure whether to pick Images or Numbers. Figuring that I'm more likely to make a mistake than she is at high-speed numbers, I went with Images and hoped she'd get mixed up. But she didn't, and I did, so that's a 4-0 win to Ewelina! She goes on to face Andrea in the finals, and I'm in my fairly regular position of resolving to do more training before the next season starts!

Mind sports are great, aren't they?