Sep 09, 2010 - Claremont, CA - Harvey Mudd College junior Palmer Mebane placed third in the 2010 U.S. Puzzle Championship, winning a spot on the U.S. national team and a chance to compete at the World Puzzle Championship in Warsaw, Poland, in October. The U.S. Puzzle Championship is an annual competition in which puzzle takers from around the world compete to solve up to 23 extremely challenging and varied logic puzzles in two and half hours, while trying to make as few errors as possible in the process.

"The U.S. team sent to the World Championship almost always wins first or second place in the team competition and has very low turnover of members," Mebane said of the honor. "I think it's been the same four people for the last four years. So I was extremely happy to make it on."

The U.S. puzzle championship typically consists of 20 to 23 language-neutral puzzles of various types, most of which are creative, logic-based puzzles. Other puzzle types do appear, such as "spot the differences," word searches, counting puzzles and criss-cross grids. None of the puzzles require knowledge of the English language. Each puzzle is given a point value according to how long it should take to solve and how difficult the puzzle is to solve. A correct answer gets that amount of points, an incorrect answer extracts a five-point penalty, and a blank answer neither gains nor loses points. The test is administered entirely online.

The top four U.S. contestants this year were Thomas Snyder, Roger Barkan, Palmer Mebane and Zack Butler, with respective scores of 365, 235, 225, 205.

"Only a few of the rule sets used in the test are familiar and well-known, like Sudoku or KenKen, and these usually appear early in the test," Mebane explained. "The last several puzzles, the hardest and most valuable, usually have completely new sets of rules, so success is not just doing thousands of Sudoku, for instance."

Mebane attributes his winning score in part to his own passion for constructing puzzles. He creates his own challenging logic puzzles on his puzzle blog.

"Work on this blog was one of the many things I had done to help me get the result I did, as puzzle construction improves solving ability too," Mebane said.

Learn more about the U.S. Puzzle Championship and upcoming World Puzzle Championship.