The Goldman Sachs analysts and game devs solving Jane Street's curious puzzle

Think you've got the requisite problem-solving skills to survive at Jane Street? The electronic trading firm puts out puzzles each month to test that notion, and then publishes the names of people who've solved its challenge. The most recent winners come from a variety of source.

Jane Street's latest puzzle, 'Fences 2', involved filling a hexagonal grid with fences so that a closed loop can be drawn through the unfenced hexagons. Each numbered hexagon on the grid should have a number of fences connected to it equal to its number. If you want the full explanation, click here.

Jane Street says 90 people have solved the puzzle successfully. Most of them are from academia. 

One of the more interesting academics to answer it is David Byrd. He spent seven years as an AI research scientist at the Georgia Institute of technology, and was a recipient of JPMorgan's PhD fellowship award in 2019. He was advised by Tucker Balch, who joined the bank that year as an MD and departed again last month. Byrd is now an assistant computer science professor at Bowdoin College.

Byrd also previously worked as a game developer, and he's not the only one to solve the puzzle. Jingtao Huang also did; he's a software engineer at Overwatch developer Blizzard, working on research and development for cutscenes. Danica Xiong, another that successfully answered the question, recently interned at Riot Games, working on core gameplay for League of Legends. The game industry has a lot of overlap with electronic trading due to their demands for high performance code, and Jane Street has been known to hire from it in the past.

Also among the winners is Paul Koomey, a recently hired analyst at Goldman Sachs in Dallas. He joined the firm after graduating last July.

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