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A motley crew of mostly Cornell University graduate students and scientists from across different STEM programs won the History Center in Tompkins County’s Treasure Hunt Sunday, taking home a prize of $10,000 worth of jewels. 
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Nine of the team’s 11 members — two helped remotely — began to appear at the History Center at about 8:15 p.m.,Sunday night. They completed the puzzling competition about 32 hours after it began at noon on Saturday. 
Some of them knew each other from their labs. A few knew one another from a juggling club and others from different board game nights.
But everyone at the History Center Sunday acknowledged that the unifying force behind the winning team was Yuqing Wu, a Ph.D. student in physics at Cornell. 
Wu’s teammates said she was the one who spurred the search for a band of puzzle solvers to compete in the treasure hunt. She went as far to organize an orientation session for prospective team members, complete with an agenda and spreadsheets. 
The group settled on the team name: 🌊🌊🌊 Coping Glaukopides 🦉🦉🦉. Wu said it is pronounced “whoosh coping glaukopides hoot hoot hoot” and was inspired by the name of another well-known competitive puzzle solving team.
With a team built, Wu established a “command center” at Cornell’s physical science building to manage communication and research during the competition. 
Victory in hand Sunday, Wu joked, “I am the command center.”
Many members of this year’s winning team competed in last year’s treasure hunt. 
For some of this year’s winning puzzlers, claiming the jewels in 2025 was unrealistic. This year, confidence was higher.
“We felt that if we could finish it by the end of the weekend, we had a good chance,” said Zev Goldhaber-Gordon, a Ph.D. student in applied engineering.

The hunt sent the team across the furthest corners of Tompkins County, rummaging around local historic sites, sometimes in the dark, decoding puns and anagrams. On at least one occasion, a part of the team had a surreal experience, arriving at what they could only describe as a “liminal space” as they hunted for a QR code that would grant them access to the next puzzle.
While the hunt was far ranging, the experience of trying to solve the puzzles was full of local history factoids and stories that enriched the experience even if that information didn’t help solve the problem they were stuck on. Scanning old maps to look for clues, the winning puzzlers learned that Ithaca’s Buffalo Street was once Buell Street, and that Trumansburg was once called Treman’s Village. 
“It’s cool to actually interact with these historic locations, said Susan “Soos” Garry, who graduated from Cornell with a master’s degree in computer science and now works in the artificial intelligence industry.
Kasia Krzyzanska, Ph.D. student in physics, said, “Throughout all of it, the thing that I enjoyed the most is reading about the individual people who actually lived here and being like, ‘What were their lives like?’” 
David Wilson, who designed the History Center’s puzzle hunt this year and last year, said there were multiple teams all circling around the final challenge at the same time this year. He said he was worried that the teams might try to sabotage each other, but what he heard instead was much more encouraging. 
“Instead, I got reports that teams were helping each other out and sharing resources, which I thought was pretty cool,” Wilson said.
Ben Sandberg, the executive director of the History Center, was delighted at the cordiality of the competition and participants’ enthusiasm for local history. 
“One of the most rewarding things for me is that it is very clear that a lot of folks who did not know each other before this connected and found community around this,” Sandberg said.
The treasure hunt is run as a fundraiser in order to help close a funding gap at the History Center. However, this year’s competition was not as successful as last year’s. Sandberg said it has been hard to make up the difference left in the History Center’s $450,000 operating budget after the Trump administration decreased the number of grants the center is eligible to receive.
Sandberg said he did not have the final numbers for the fundraiser, but last year 171 teams paid to register and the center raised more than $25,000. This year, only about 60 teams registered. 
“I feel a little stuck because it is so very clear that there is a community that loves this. It’s a way to get them connected to places of local history and parts of community history that feels exciting and revelatory and beautiful to discover,” Sandberg said. “The reality is that we’re such a small organization that the amount of institutional resources we put towards doing this means that it needs to be a big enough success as a fundraiser to justify that allocation.”
But he was quick to add that the experience of running the treasure hunt has still been a rewarding one.
“We’re excited and jazzed and having a great time, and so I don’t want to discount that,” Sandberg said.
Perhaps no one is as jazzed as the winning team, which began the discussion of how to divide their spoils Sunday night at the History Center. 
Initially, splitting the prize presented a potential challenge. As a rule, the History Center set a rule that it would not participate in how the winnings were split up.
With 12 cases of jewels for a team of 11, it would appear to be an unfortunate division problem.
“So then I can get two,” joked Srijan Bhattarai, a Ph.D. student in biochemistry, molecular and cell biology. 
But when the group focused on how they would approach the issue, the proposal to use an algorithm to share the winnings was quickly embraced.
Wu said she might know a professor at Cornell familiar with that topic that could help. 
Then Orion Smedley, a Ph.D student in physics, said he was familiar with some scientific papers on optimal fairness. He noted the papers he was talking about were used by Splitit.com to develop some of their financial services. 
“But I think there’s like some new papers that have come out since then on further optimality,” Smedley said.
“This sounds like something we got from the Big Bang Theory,” Bhattarai said.
The members of 🌊🌊🌊 Coping Glaukopides 🦉🦉🦉
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Jimmy Jordan is the managing editor of the The Ithaca Voice. He has called Ithaca home since 2016, and joined The Ithaca voice in 2021 as a general assignment reporter. He stepped into his role as editor…
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