About PuzzleCrack
PuzzleCrack 2008 is the seventh annual "puzzlehunt" competition held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. It follows in the footsteps of the MIT Mystery Hunt, Stanford's Jackpot, and Microsoft's Puzzlehunt. However, it's also a little different.
Unlike most competitions, PuzzleCrack has few rules. Puzzles can be worked on by individuals or by teams, there is no limit to team size, and every available resource for solving the puzzles is fair game. All that matters is who gets the correct answer each day.
Puzzles can, and likely will, consist of nearly anything. We'll rarely tell you exactly what the puzzle is or how to solve it, but an email now and then goes a long way to getting a friendly hint.
The goal is to have fun and to find the best and brightest minds out there. After all, if winning prizes doesn't interest you, wouldn't it be nice to prove you're the best?
Puzzle Availability
All the puzzles for the competition will be posted online daily at 10:00am central time. For Monday through Thursday, anyone at all is welcome to compete. In fact, we encourage competition from those off-campus. However, Friday's puzzle will require an on-campus presence.
Because of the primarily online-based nature of the puzzles, regardless of your location, you're eligible to win prizes. And, if you've been competing throughout the week and would like a shot at Friday as well, we will do our best to pair up remote competitors with those at UIUC.