Stylized Jared Lyon text

2003 US Puzzle Championship: It's official, I'm a genius!

Date published: June 16, 2003

Some of the puzzles from the 2003 competition

Okay, okay, it's not exactly true that I'm a genius, but I did get my results back from the 2003 US Puzzle Championship that I competed in. The actual competition was a 2-hour test held on May 31, 2003 at 1pm EDT. I wasn't really competing though. I was just doing it for fun to see how I'd do. Anyway, I scored an 85 and placed 208th out of the 744 US contestants. So roughly I was in the top quarter of people who competed. I'm quite proud of that. Here's a chart for a visual idea of how I did.

2003 US Puzzle Championship results bar chart

In case you're wondering what the winners get:

  • The top two US contestants win a spot on the US Team (sponsored by Google, Binary Arts, and Random House) to compete at the World Puzzle Championship in the Netherlands in October, 2003.
  • The top 25 US contestants win a prize, donated by team sponsor Binary Arts.
  • The top three Canadian contestants are invited to join the Canadian Team to complete at the World Puzzle Championship. Interestingly, only 44 people in Canada competed.

The two US contestants who won were Wei-Hwa Huang and Roger Barkan. For more information, check out the World Puzzle Federation's Team USA site.