I Spent Three Nights Solving Listen Labs Berghain Challenge (and Got #16)
8 comments
·September 21, 2025chriskw
mpeg
That's what I thought when I saw the challenge originally... maybe a better way of running it would have been to have each run be with a deterministic seed, and apply to all candidates.
That way people can test offline with random sequences, but the leaderboard runs have the same seed for everyone. Maybe I'm missing something obvious, but I think this would have lessened the impact of luck.
NooneAtAll3
> For Scenario 1 (just two traits), he solved it exactly using dynamic programming.
I wonder if this exact solve tried setting "more rejections than X" as failure, so that you can get better best case for the cost of dropped worst cases
4gotunameagain
Wait until they find out that guest list on Berghain does not guarantee entry !
What is the probability of a person with both the attributes "looks like they belong to berghain" and "can solve an obscure live optimisation challenge" ?
aqme28
> What is the probability of a person with both the attributes "looks like they belong to berghain" and "can solve an obscure live optimisation challenge" ?
As someone who goes there often, I can say it's surprisingly high
4gotunameagain
Surprisingly high is not high, or we're meeting different kinds of people in there ;)
Nice to see another participant's thinking process for the puzzles! I ended up getting 5th place using dynamic programming for all of the scenarios, but I'm under the impression that almost everybody in the top 20 had almost equally good strategies and most of the variance in scores was due to luck with the sequence of people they got.
A quick sanity check is in Scenario 2, you needed 300 creative people each with a ~6.2% chance of showing up. The odds of getting a sequence of people where that's even possible for the first place score (2906 rejections + 1000 accepts = 3906 total people) is on the order of 1 in 10000, and that's without even factoring in the other constraints.