Cisco Euro Challenge
Into the Night
Rob Howard - SleepMonsters.com / 10.09.2004
The stage began by the Seehaus restaurant, the imposing façade of which was lit up and reflected in the water of Pflegersee. The start/finish was also brightly lit, and noisy with the sound of generators and the chatter of the teams as they prepared for the 90 minutes ahead.
As soon as they’d collected their answer sheets and maps with the locations of the 10 question points they raced off, all using the headtorches supplied by Challenger World. The start was suddenly quiet again and parts of the forest below were soon busy with teams shouting directions as they struggled with the complex maze of forest trails. Many of these were not marked on the map and quite a few teams were lost and grateful to hit on a question point by accident, so they could find their position.
The Azlan UK team were one of these. “We tried to find IP8 and ended up in someone’s house,� said Dave Pearson. “Then we ran a long way downhill and found an IP and were nowhere near where we thought. But we used the answer we collected there. We visited 8 or 9 of the question points but only answered 3 or 4 – we’re just not good at these puzzles.�
Some of these were symbols, others codes, and some were mathematical. When you are tired and under pressure it’s not easy to figure out a question like; “A florist has a lot of flowers to deliver. He can deliver 40 orders in 4 hours with 1 truck. How many trucks should he hire to deliver 160 orders in 2 hours?�
There was map giving the location of an IP with the answer at each Question Point, but these were always a long way away, and it wasn’t easy to plan a route to take them in. Most teams tried to work out the answers on the spot rather than chase the IP’s, but they won’t know if they got them right until the results are announced in the morning and all the times and bonuses worked out. Among the leaders both Fugitsu and Airbus thought they had 8 out of 10 right.
Most of the teams settled for far less. As Karsten Hauffe of Dimension Data Germany said, “We felt the strain of the whole day all over our bodies on that run. We will sleep well tonight.�
(* The answer is 8.)
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