Ex-Harvey Mudders find analytics treasure

The team of Seneca Harberger (nom de blog “Shepard Wallace”) and Madineh Sarvestani were the first to find the $100 prize (hey, they do it for the ciphering, not the money) in the 2012 Analytics Treasure Hunt by solving a series of five analytical puzzles which, when put together in the right order, revealed the coordinates for the hidden “treasure.”

In the July/August issue of Analytics magazine, PuzzlOR/Thinking Analytically columnist John Toczek provided the puzzles and put up the prize money (http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/40f74a63#/40f74a63/38). Hundreds of treasure hunters from around the world took up the challenge, including Harberger and Sarvestani. The treasure was hidden in Fairmont Park in Northwest Philadelphia; the coordinates: 40.07284,75.21907.

Harberger, a student at Temple University Medical School in Philadelphia (which gave him a home-town advantage), and Sarvestani, who lives in State College, Pa., where she’s a graduate student studying neural engineering at Penn State, have a common dominator: Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif.  Harberger holds a B.S. in physics from Harvey Mudd, while Sarvestani earned a B.S. in engineering at Harvey Mudd. Another Harvey Mudder, Tim Carnes, who completed his Ph.D. in applied operations research at Cornell and is now a research scientist at Link Analytics, introduced the two winners to the contest and helped verify their answers.

“You had a small crowd of people from Harvey Mudd looking for the treasure,” Sarvestani tells us. “To our fortune, most (of the Harvey Mudders) didn’t live in the Philly area and none had my eagle vision.”