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Google hosts games in Benton Hall

The eventual winners of the Google Games were hard at workThe winners of the Google Games hard at work.
Left to right: Cheney Lyford, Matt DePero, Cole
Hoffbauer, and Megan Moore

Google programmers came to Miami's campus last week to host the "Google Games" for students.

The games consisted of some very difficult puzzles and challenges. It had a secret agent theme that carried through all of the challenges, leading to numerous scenarios for students to solve.

Ten teams of four or five competed, consisting of mostly computer science, software engineering, and math majors.

The Games were split into two rounds. The first one was a series of nine challenges. All of the challenges could be solved through a combination of math, coding, and wordplay.

One challenge required students to come up with a series of song lyrics that corresponded to different spy "signs". Another featured 1000 spies in a room together who have all mixed up their top hats, and need to swap hats to get the correct one back.

Round two challenged the teams to figure out as many words as they could in a word web. The center of the web featured spy movies, but as the students moved towards the periphery of the web the topics diverged and students had to find the connections between the topics.

The winning team consisted of Cheney Lyford, Matt DePero, Cole Hoffbauer, and Megan Moore. For their prize they each received a Google Home.

By Paige Smith