We wanted to time our prank for maximum impact, so we waited until MIT's Career Day, when thousands of job-hungry students would interview with potential employers at the school's massive career fair.
We arrived early that morning, plastering the MIT campus with hundreds of fake Google Jobs ads. We quietly watched the first students trickle in, delighted to find them captivated by the prank.
This student pondered the puzzle for a good five or ten minutes.
This student took out his cellphone to snap a picture of the puzzle.
Then we made our way over to the Career Fair, where we had no credentials or authority to do what we did next: unroll a massive, 20-foot banner directly over the main entrance to the Fair.
Also exhibiting at the fair were everyone from Microsoft to the CIA. (Google was absent.)
As we were hanging the sign, one of the exhibitors said, "Well, I know I'm not smart enough to solve that."
Just before the crowds arrived.
The lines to get in were incredibly long, so we also plastered signs at various points in the queue, so students would have plenty of time to solve the puzzle.
Note the vast quantities of MIT students desperate for jobs in this economy.
Here the prank sign is hung just above a recruiting ad for the CIA.
It was satisfying to watch the students puzzle over our prank, and we placed bets on how long it would take a student to crack it. Guesses ranged from "ten minutes" to "two hours."
THE FIRST MIT STUDENT TO SOLVE THE PUZZLE
Then we went back to ZUG headquarters and watched our rented voicemail boxes for the first students to crack the code. Nobody had called in yet, so we waited.
And waited.
We waited three days, and not one MIT student cracked the code in that time. We had gotten the prank in front of thousands of students, we had personally seen dozens of students try to solve it -- but not one student did.
This was an amazing revelation: MIT students are dumber than anyone ever thought.
Fortunately, there were plenty of smarter people on the Internet.
Please continue on to Part 3!
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