Saturday: Puzzling (and a bit of Hell's Kitchen)

Saturday was devoted to the annual US puzzle championship. As most of you know, I like puzzles. These puzzles are mostly deductive reasoning puzzles, constraint satisfaction in particular. I've competed in this for the last four or so years; I usually do pretty respectably, somewhere around 100th in the US. (One year I did as well as well as 31st! :) Of course, this isn't anywhere near as good as my friend Wei-Hwa who usually triples my score, winning the competition and then going on to lead the US puzzle team to victory in the international competition (and get first or second in that individually as well). That's pretty insane.

In any case, this year I think I did about as well as usual. I didn't actually get to practice beforehand and I felt as if I answered less than previous years but still felt I was making good progress. Maybe the questions were harder? I doubt it, because usually after one of these 2.5 hour competitions I spend a number more hours just to see how much better I'd do if I had more time. In these cases, I can usually get closer to Wei-Hwa's score, solving 3/4rds of the problems, in two days or so. But this time I finished almost all the problems during the rest of the day. So maybe it was easier? Oh well, it matters little. It was fun. If you are interested, download it and give it shot and tell me what you think of the whole thing. And remember, no computers, calculators, none of that stuff.

Before the competition I explored the west side of my neighborhood (Chelsea). Not that eventful. I saw Chelsea Piers, a really really large sports and entertainment complex built on four piers (and some space inland). Think about that. Covers well over the size of four SF-size piers. They have equipment for any sport you can imagine, from bowling to trapeze. Most of the west side and north-west side is old warehouses and storage places. Fairly run-down. It used to be called Hell's Kitchen and maybe still is.

Incidentally, for brunch before the competition, I looked for a moroccan restaurant I heard about from chowhounders. But I never found it. Instead, I went in a restaurant/juice bar called Amazonia because the special sounded neat: carrot juice, gazpacho, and a chickpea wrap. Okay. I don't think I'll go back again; the place didn't seem very clean and I'm not a bit fan or grocery-store bought paper plates and bowls. I was also surprised to learn it was actually on my list of food places to go -maybe I shouldn't trust chowhounders so much- but then, maybe it only made my list because of the smoothies?

After the competition, I got good directions and the actual street address of the moroccan place. But still couldn't find it. Bah! Instead I found a burrito place that had a special that sounded fancy, red onions and such, and had high hopes it'd be like Cancun (in Berkeley, not the one SF: that one is also good, but they're quite different). Sadly, it turned out to be just an average burrito place.