"Do you want my password?" A student asked. Halogram, gravedigger, parachute, sunglasses, and twizzlesticksrumplestilkinnes were just a few of the dozens of passwords thrown about on Columbia's campus in the past week.

Monday November 15th marked the beginning of Columbia's Social Experiment. Students had five days to acquire as many passwords as possible from undisclosed password holders. The goal was to collect the most code words through social interactions with other students.

Founder Ben Turndorf explained his reasoning behind the Experiment: "What if we could maybe at least get people thinking about how to interact more. Or a little differently. Just say hi in the elevator one time. Just because you have the excuse of the game and you go forward thinking maybe i can do that all of the time or some of the time, and whether or not it worked for you or other people, you know it's up for debate."

Friends Abril Dozal and Sharon Wu - CC Class of 2013 - won the competition together, pooling their efforts and each taking home 250 dollars. 

"We got the e-mail from our RA and the night before some of our friends were talking about how there was this game going on, and a few minutes before the deadline we were like 'let's play!'," said Dozal.

And play they did. Dozal and Wu got off to a quick start, accumulating dozens of passwords by the end of the first night.

"We kept playing because we were on top and I was like, 'we have to win!'," Dozal remembers.

"We definitely had more motivation to play because we were doing well," says Wu. "So, I guess there was like a competitive aspect to it."

Dozal and Wu along with others turned to their facebook friends for passwords, rather than interacting with strangers face-to-face as the founders of the social experiment had wanted.

"For me, it was facebook-ing people who i hadn't talked to since maybe days on campus-like that far back," says Wu recounting her most awkward social experiences of the week.

Ninth place finisher Jeremy Martin was perturbed by players receiving help from friends and working to win with online servers. "I feel a lot of the passwords that people obtained were probably just through facebook and texting people and mine were no exception," Martin says.

The experiment was met with mixed reactions from the student body.

"It seems kind of sham-like," says one student. "I don't really see how it fosters socialization, people just go up to you and ask for the password. It doesn't really foster conversation in the same way going outside and having a cigarette would." Another student cited game theory as to why he did not participate: "They show the statistics also. I went online I saw that someone already had 89 passwords and I had two, so I was like,OK...."

A student in favor of the experiment remarked, "So many outside sources picked up on this news and kind of twisted it and made it into a commentary on social life at Columbia which is sort of true. but it was an experiment even just as a program to see if whether or not it would succeed, and I felt it was really fun and something we should probably do again next year."

In response to the Social Experiment, a group of students formed the Socialist Experiment, a collective that planned to win the game together and donate the winnings to charity.

"In reducing social interaction to a competition it wasn't really encouraging the best tendencies of Columbians," says a student who e-mailed the Socialist Experiment his password.

Ian Kwok, one of the organizers of the Socialist Experiment, was moved by the positive feedback, the group received from students. "Every e-mail that we got was incredible," says Kwok. "The fact that you have people you don't know feeling the same cause and being a part of it. It was a great sense of unity that you don't really get in a lot of situations."

The socialist experiment did not have enough passwords sent to them, and ultimately finished third behind both Dozal and Wu. The two sophomores have already decided how they will each spend their half of the 500 dollar prize.

"I'm actually paying my sorority dues with them," says Wu.

"I'm paying for my flight home," says Dozal.

They also plan to repay their friends who helped supply them with passwords. "We're going to buy our friends who helped us some cake," Wu said. Dozal added, "They helped us a lot so they deserve some cake."

Correction: The original version of the article misstated the year of study for Abril Dozal and Sharon Wu. They are sophomores in Columbia College, not freshmen.