Palmer Mebane HM ’12 helped the United States emerge victorious from the 19th World Puzzle Championship last month in Paprotnia, Poland.

Mebane, a Harvey Mudd math major and puzzle enthusiast since his preschool years, was the youngest member and the only undergraduate student on the four-person team that brought the U.S. its 12th gold medal in the annual competition. Mebane qualified for the team in August 2010. He described himself as “the newcomer” on a team of veteran competitive puzzle solvers.

“The team has remained about the same people for around five years,” Mebane said.

While the three older competitors drew on years of experience as teammates, Mebane arrived in Poland without having met any other member of Team USA. This unfamiliarity presented a challenge, since teammates are expected to work together on puzzles in several rounds of the competition.

Mebane said the team used breaks between rounds for quick planning sessions, a strategy that allowed the team to cohere successfully.

“I think I adapted to working with them pretty well,” he said. “We did win, so it couldn’t have been too bad.”

Working with a team of experienced competitors brought benefits as well as challenges, Mebane added.

“Some of my teammates are longtime veterans, so I basically just listened to their advice on how to approach [puzzles], and it was like I was one, too,” he said.

Even with all the team’s skill and experience, Mebane said, one puzzle caught all four members off-guard. Each team was given a map of the area around the championship site and a set of photographs taken in that area. Their task was to match the images with the spots on the map where they must have been taken—a surprising departure from the competition’s focus on abstract logic.

Still, Team U.S.A. outperformed its rivals overall, especially in the two rounds that Mebane said marked his “best performances.” These puzzles, called “Snake” and “Spiral Galaxies,” turned on types of logic that Mebane said were among his strengths.

The team also benefited from Mebane’s experience in creating his own puzzles, which he posts on his blog. One of Mebane’s specialties is a type of grid puzzle called “Akari,” of which he once created an example “a hundred times larger than anything that you would usually see.”

“Sure enough, when it came up, I ploughed through it pretty quickly,” Mebane said of the Akari puzzle that he completed in Poland. He added that the puzzle was “about as hard as you could make an Akari puzzle of that size,” and that the experience of creating an oversized puzzle helped him understand the underlying logic.

“I’m extremely proud of Palmer’s success at the World Puzzle Championship, and I know this feeling is shared by other members of the Harvey Mudd College community,” HMC President Maria Klawe said in an e-mail to The Student Life. “Our students compete in a wide variety of competitions each year, and we’re thrilled by their success in so many different arenas.”

Mebane became interested in puzzles at about age three, when he started playing the puzzle game “Adventures of Lolo” for Nintendo Entertainment System.

“I actually got into puzzles through electronic games, and it was only much later that I got into pencil-and-paper puzzles,” he said, adding that this order of events would probably seem “backwards” to his older teammates.

Mebane plans to try to qualify for Team USA again next year. Competitors secure spots on the national team based on their performance in the US Puzzle Championship, a summer competition administered online.

For now, though, Mebane is taking a few months off from competitive puzzle-solving to recover from “a certain amount of fatigue,” which he said is typical among World Puzzle Championship competitors.