Scott Duke Kominers, Columnist

Kominers’s Conundrums: The Empire Strikes Back on a Holiday

We’re celebrating Star Wars Day with a puzzle that could save the universe.

May 2, 2021 at 12:00 PM UTC

Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and a faculty affiliate of the Harvard University department of economics.

A dire threat from a galaxy far, far away. — A dire threat from a galaxy far, far away.
Photographer: Stone/Getty Images

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This Tuesday — May 4 — we celebrate Star Wars Day (May the “Fourth” be with you)! But this year, there’s trouble brewing: Conundrums intelligence has discovered that the Galactic Empire is working on a fourth Death Star.1

A rebel agent codenamed “Zigzag” discovered this while embedded inside the Empire’s Office of Major Initiatives. He managed to get a copy of the plans, which he’s smuggled to our non-canonical outpost in a galaxy far, far, away with the help of trading droid BL00M-Bg. These documents reveal that like its predecessors, the new Death Star has a critical weakness. This time, though, it’s not the usual thermal exhaust port — the Empire does learn from its mistakes, eventually.