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The Hunt, My Sixty Hours. Part I.
I've been writing this slowly, so I thought I'd post the beginning:
In recounting the tale of my vacation, I begin with the last day, which took about sixty hours.
On Friday morning, I awoke in Providence and packed my bag with toiletries, extra clothes and some warm-up puzzles to work on as I rode into Boston.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
veek drove me to the Providence Commuter Rail Station and I boarded the train into the city. It was a calm ride. Once there, I switched to the T and exited at Kendall Square, near MIT. davidglasser had provided me with some rather convoluted directions ("Turn right onto the street whose name I can never remember . . ."), but I was running out of time and followed them to the best of my ability. Although I went off track about half-way through, I still managed to end up in Building 4, my destination, and I quickly found ACRONYM headquarters.
It was about 11:50 a.m. and the entire team was heading off to Lobby 7 for the opening of the Hunt. I barely had time to drop off my things before I ran outside to follow Codex out the door. It wasn't until we were all gathered in the large main entrance of MIT that I got to stop and introduce myself to some of the team members who had assembled. This was the beginning of what was to be, for me, a weekend of many NPL introductions. It began with finally coming face to face withbookishfellow, thedan and saxikath, our team leader. I also got to finally meet davidglasser, whom I'd known from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
ifmud, and NPL member jangler, who happened to wander over to our camp (for values of "camp" equal to "pillar we were huddled around"). This was only a small corner of the huge room, packed full with people, all waiting for the puzzling to start. I distinctly remember on person holding up a large turnip. (I later learned that this was Team Turnips. Should've guessed, eh?)
This, by the way, at noon on Friday, is when the sixty hours began. All chronology henceforth is subject to being slightly muddled.
Every team, and there were about thirty, was required to register beforehand, and there was a good deal of shouting from Team Acme in the Lobby, making sure that all teams were registered and checked in. Assaxikath filled out our final, official entry form, we perused our introductory papers.
Let me take a moment to offer some background about Acme and the Hunt. A great deal of information can be found in this article, written by Eric Albert, who was also on the team "SNAFU fans" this year. In short, every year, some group of people set up a series of interrelated puzzles that ultimately lead to the location of what is traditionally a coin. The team that succeeds in finding the coin first gets the privilege of designing and running the hunt the next year. Acme won the 2002 Hunt, so they had spent the entire year planning for this year's.
Furthermore, every Hunt traditionally has a theme that structures the Hunt and links the puzzles together in an interesting way. Last year, the theme was Monopoly. There was a puzzle for every space on a Monopoly board, along with puzzles for the four houses and one hotel of every monopoly gained. This year, the theme appeared to be "Corporate America." We read the introductory letter to us, AcmeCorp's new hires, from AcmeCorp's CEO, N. Ron Adelphia, thinking that it was slightly weak for a theme. We did think we had some clues, though, as the letter prominently featured phrases such as "bright light," "shining future," and "burning desire"; surely, these keywords, coupled with the idea of Corporate America could only mean a descent into Hell to face the Devil himself. As we discussed grabbing a copy of Dante's Inferno from the library, AcmeCorp stepped up to the podium.
We were informed of our status, as the letter had indicated, as new hires to the somewhat nebulous firm of AcmeCorp (a company dedicated to "providing integrated solutions, adding shareholder value, and increasing customer satisfaction"). With lots of pointless cheering for AcmeCorp (everyone likes to have fun at these things), we were told that we would be facing some challenges. Then our benevolent CEO, Mr. Adelphia, took the podium to give us an inspirational message.
But no sooner had Mr. Adelphia opened his mouth to thank his colleagues in Human Resources when a mysterious figure from the balcony of the lobby brutally gunned him down in a flurry of bullets. (saxikath later informed us that unnamed gunman bore a remarkable similarity to Carmen Sandiego, who was a main character the last time Team Acme ran the Hunt.) A thoroughly distressed Human Resources Department told us to return to our Headquarters and await further instructions. DG ran off to a local computer lab (or Athena cluster, as they're called at MIT) to print up the puzzles inevitably waiting for us, and the Hunt was on.
We walked hurriedly back to headquarters where there were already a few copies of round one puzzles. (http://www.acme-corp.com/teamGuest/1/.) Everyone started work on different puzzles. I sat down with Slik and Wombat with A Pile of Letters, which looked like a crossword puzzle with a twist. The clues were straightforward, and we worked through almost all of them very quickly. When we had almost all of them, Wombat noticed that the they could be interlaced in a particular way so that all of the conflicting answers fit into the grid. Working out the interlacing turned out to be a two-person job, and so I drift away to work with some of the other puzzles.
Sax had looked at First Round Puzzle and determined that she needed a bottle of Rolling Rock beer, which she went out to get. Several people are working with Google on the two trivia puzzles, Something in Common and the insane Kevin Bacon game Making Connections. Occasionally, one or more of them would jump up and ask a question and anyone who happened to hear it answered. A few were using a handily-brought set of state quarters to crack Financial Report. A few team members had visited ACMECorp headquarters and watched a Powerpoint presentation (Oooh, how corporate!) connected to Job Performance Predictor that had some disturbingly easy questions. So I settled down to make some headway on Minor Edits.
A while later, I'd made no noticeable progress on Minor Edits, although there were quite a lot of notes. I looked around to see what had happened. For what was a very simple puzzle, Round One Puzzle ended up giving a lot of trouble. There's a note about using Internet IE for the puzzle. That's because of us noticing that we had two different sizes of text from two different browsers. This is important as we were wrapping and unwrapping strings of text around the bottle. After we got the right browser text, we kept looking in the wrong place. Eventually, someone noticed the answer. Hooray! Diligence paid off on Something in Common and Making Connections, and they both fell providing some more answers.
During this round, we got our first visits from ACME members. We got a lot of those throughout the Hunt. Apparently their HQ was small and surprisingly boring, so it behooved them to get out to watch people work. Many of the ACME members were also NPL members who I got to meet for the first time like Lunch Boy, Chainsaw, and several others. One of the most interesting for me was meeting Tahnan, with whom I've coauthored puzzles in the past. He also helped me out a few months back by testing Museum Piece before I showed it at the Puzzle Party at my house. He was a really nice guy whom I enjoyed talking to whenever he stopped by. (Something he did often; our team captain is his roommate.)
Eventually, other puzzles produced some odd results. The people who watched the Powerpoint questions filled in their answers and got the letters "ED", which turned out not to be the answer. They send someone back and discover that was a red herring, and get the correct answer. The quartermasters were stuck until they realized that the printout they were using didn't show all of the quarters. After they had the full puzzle, they identified all of the states, but all they could get as an answer was the letters "LL". Stuck again. The interlacing had been finished on A Pile of Letters, but nobody could figure out the answer, all we could see were the two letters "TH" in the completed grid.
Luckily, someone noticed that all of the answers we did have had silent letters in them. Arranging them gave us: _O_ALB_. Cazique joked that the answer was "Total B.S." Everyone laughed. Someone noticed that "Illinois" is a state with a silent S and a double L, which would fit as a the answer to Financial Report. We reach a consensus that, even if "Total B.S." was not the answer, it would be fun to call it in. ("Calling in" is something we did a lot. It's the process of calling into headquarters and asking them to confirm an answer.) So we called. "Total B.S." was correct. We'd solved round one early, and ACME gave us access to the next round of puzzles slightly earlier than scheduled. We were doing well.
So it was a little bit before 4 p.m. on Friday, and we started scanning through the new puzzles. One in particular caught everyone's eye, Company Picnic, aka, the Iron Chef puzzle. A few of us went out to meet with some ACME members to pick out a secret ingredient and to get the materials for Shredded What? Our ingredient was bananas, and several of the more culinarily-minded persons went to Sax's kitchen to bake the required meals. The plastic baggie looked less promising. It turned out to be a large, double-sided, black-and-white sheet of paper . . . shredded into tiny, nearly identical strips. I would get to know these strips very well before the night was over.
But first, let's talk about the field. TK had grabbed a copy of Abducted!, which looked like a series of driving directions. It turned out that it was a series of driving directions, and TK worked diligently and systematically figuring out where they led to. What's Green, Hangs on the Wall, and Whistles? was the traditional scavenger hunt, and the MIT students and locals went straight to work collecting everything. That Mixer was the traditional party (which I went to later). Stairway to Heaven was a music-based puzzle, andthedan set down on that right away. The Road Signs of Unspeakable Chaos and A Problem with Printing were both very complex programming puzzles. If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that the only thing I could be of help with was Shredded What. I went over there and jigsaw-puzzled.
After a little while, something odd happened. Sax (before heading home with her Iron Chefs), answered our team phone to hear an unidentified male voice (she was pretty it was Tahnan, though) with the following message: "I'm looking for you, but you're not looking hard enough for me. You left something at the Office," or words to that effect. We have no idea what this means.
So we put together the little bits of paper. Slowly. Cazique notices that one of the images we're putting together is a cover of Red Herring Magazine. Since the introduction to the puzzle instructs us to "ignore any red herrings" we suspect that this is the side of the puzzle we don't need for the answer. As we continue, we find a can of herring in red sauce, a picture of a herring that seems to have been colored in (we presume red), a statuette of The Angry Red Herring from The Tick and a novel called, you guessed it, The Red Herring.
While we're deshredding, TK had solved a puzzle, but didn't know what to do with it. The directions he was looking at apparently led from MIT to the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan. So how did that lead to an answer? Well, the introduction talked about something dangling above someone at the final destination. "What would dangle above the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan?" I asked. "The flag of Kyrgyzstan," I thought. So we looked up the flag of Kyrgyzstan. And it was very much a flag. Of Kyrgyzstan. At this point, we look at the structure of Round 2, which was a bit unorthodox. It seemed possible that the answer might actually be "The Flag of Kyrgyzstan." So TK calls it in, and is told that we can't simply say "The Flag of Kyrgyzstan," someone from ACME has to actually see the answer. Someone stops by and TK shows them a picture from our almanac. Our first round two answer is confirmed. And a trend is set for this round. Instead of words or phrases, the answers are pictures and, later, objects.
Spelvin has finished reconstructed the musical passage of Stairway to Heaven. He began to play it in the hopes that anyone might recognize it. He would do this for the next twelve hours.
So I did some more with shredded paper.
We got another mysterious phone call. Apparently, we weren't looking at "the big picture" and needed to go deeper. Again, we didn't know what this means.
More shredded paper.
The cooks came back and prepared a marvelous dinner for some ACME judges. Food was set on fire. Woo! We received our second Round 2 answer, a slice of a chocolate orange.
Still more shredded paper. At this point, we've got quite a lot of the big stuff put together, but an ACME representative confirms that we have to finish up the rest. Woo. Hoo.
Seven thirty rolls around, and I joined the group going to That Mixer. This was exciting for me since it meant I got to meet more NPL people. On our way over, we turned into one big group consisting of ACRONYM, SNAFU fans and Setec Astronomy. We learned that everyone seems to be having big troubles with this Hunt, but everyone's also having a good time. At the party, I met a good number of people and spent time talking to them. I spent less time getting involved with the game events spread across the room. There were four games, Boggle, Reverse Spelling Bee, Oreo Stacking and Big Dumb Five (a sort of bluffing game). A team member had to win each of the games to play the final game in the sekrit area. While Cazique kicked ass at most every game, I got to talk to Kray from Setec Astronomy, whom I knew from the LA NPL parties he'd been to. I also got to meet G Natural, Squonk and Ucaoimhu. In the end, my team finally got to play the last game, Memory, that nets us our third answer, a slice of pizza.
We walked back to headquarters, and Round Three had been released.
By now, I was very tired. I went into the sleeping room and took a nap. By the time I woke up, the Hunt had exploded.
To be continued . . .
In recounting the tale of my vacation, I begin with the last day, which took about sixty hours.
On Friday morning, I awoke in Providence and packed my bag with toiletries, extra clothes and some warm-up puzzles to work on as I rode into Boston.
veek drove me to the Providence Commuter Rail Station and I boarded the train into the city. It was a calm ride. Once there, I switched to the T and exited at Kendall Square, near MIT. davidglasser had provided me with some rather convoluted directions ("Turn right onto the street whose name I can never remember . . ."), but I was running out of time and followed them to the best of my ability. Although I went off track about half-way through, I still managed to end up in Building 4, my destination, and I quickly found ACRONYM headquarters.It was about 11:50 a.m. and the entire team was heading off to Lobby 7 for the opening of the Hunt. I barely had time to drop off my things before I ran outside to follow Codex out the door. It wasn't until we were all gathered in the large main entrance of MIT that I got to stop and introduce myself to some of the team members who had assembled. This was the beginning of what was to be, for me, a weekend of many NPL introductions. It began with finally coming face to face with
bookishfellow, thedan and saxikath, our team leader. I also got to finally meet davidglasser, whom I'd known from ifmud, and NPL member jangler, who happened to wander over to our camp (for values of "camp" equal to "pillar we were huddled around"). This was only a small corner of the huge room, packed full with people, all waiting for the puzzling to start. I distinctly remember on person holding up a large turnip. (I later learned that this was Team Turnips. Should've guessed, eh?)This, by the way, at noon on Friday, is when the sixty hours began. All chronology henceforth is subject to being slightly muddled.
Every team, and there were about thirty, was required to register beforehand, and there was a good deal of shouting from Team Acme in the Lobby, making sure that all teams were registered and checked in. As
saxikath filled out our final, official entry form, we perused our introductory papers.Let me take a moment to offer some background about Acme and the Hunt. A great deal of information can be found in this article, written by Eric Albert, who was also on the team "SNAFU fans" this year. In short, every year, some group of people set up a series of interrelated puzzles that ultimately lead to the location of what is traditionally a coin. The team that succeeds in finding the coin first gets the privilege of designing and running the hunt the next year. Acme won the 2002 Hunt, so they had spent the entire year planning for this year's.
Furthermore, every Hunt traditionally has a theme that structures the Hunt and links the puzzles together in an interesting way. Last year, the theme was Monopoly. There was a puzzle for every space on a Monopoly board, along with puzzles for the four houses and one hotel of every monopoly gained. This year, the theme appeared to be "Corporate America." We read the introductory letter to us, AcmeCorp's new hires, from AcmeCorp's CEO, N. Ron Adelphia, thinking that it was slightly weak for a theme. We did think we had some clues, though, as the letter prominently featured phrases such as "bright light," "shining future," and "burning desire"; surely, these keywords, coupled with the idea of Corporate America could only mean a descent into Hell to face the Devil himself. As we discussed grabbing a copy of Dante's Inferno from the library, AcmeCorp stepped up to the podium.
We were informed of our status, as the letter had indicated, as new hires to the somewhat nebulous firm of AcmeCorp (a company dedicated to "providing integrated solutions, adding shareholder value, and increasing customer satisfaction"). With lots of pointless cheering for AcmeCorp (everyone likes to have fun at these things), we were told that we would be facing some challenges. Then our benevolent CEO, Mr. Adelphia, took the podium to give us an inspirational message.
But no sooner had Mr. Adelphia opened his mouth to thank his colleagues in Human Resources when a mysterious figure from the balcony of the lobby brutally gunned him down in a flurry of bullets. (
saxikath later informed us that unnamed gunman bore a remarkable similarity to Carmen Sandiego, who was a main character the last time Team Acme ran the Hunt.) A thoroughly distressed Human Resources Department told us to return to our Headquarters and await further instructions. DG ran off to a local computer lab (or Athena cluster, as they're called at MIT) to print up the puzzles inevitably waiting for us, and the Hunt was on.We walked hurriedly back to headquarters where there were already a few copies of round one puzzles. (http://www.acme-corp.com/teamGuest/1/.) Everyone started work on different puzzles. I sat down with Slik and Wombat with A Pile of Letters, which looked like a crossword puzzle with a twist. The clues were straightforward, and we worked through almost all of them very quickly. When we had almost all of them, Wombat noticed that the they could be interlaced in a particular way so that all of the conflicting answers fit into the grid. Working out the interlacing turned out to be a two-person job, and so I drift away to work with some of the other puzzles.
Sax had looked at First Round Puzzle and determined that she needed a bottle of Rolling Rock beer, which she went out to get. Several people are working with Google on the two trivia puzzles, Something in Common and the insane Kevin Bacon game Making Connections. Occasionally, one or more of them would jump up and ask a question and anyone who happened to hear it answered. A few were using a handily-brought set of state quarters to crack Financial Report. A few team members had visited ACMECorp headquarters and watched a Powerpoint presentation (Oooh, how corporate!) connected to Job Performance Predictor that had some disturbingly easy questions. So I settled down to make some headway on Minor Edits.
A while later, I'd made no noticeable progress on Minor Edits, although there were quite a lot of notes. I looked around to see what had happened. For what was a very simple puzzle, Round One Puzzle ended up giving a lot of trouble. There's a note about using Internet IE for the puzzle. That's because of us noticing that we had two different sizes of text from two different browsers. This is important as we were wrapping and unwrapping strings of text around the bottle. After we got the right browser text, we kept looking in the wrong place. Eventually, someone noticed the answer. Hooray! Diligence paid off on Something in Common and Making Connections, and they both fell providing some more answers.
During this round, we got our first visits from ACME members. We got a lot of those throughout the Hunt. Apparently their HQ was small and surprisingly boring, so it behooved them to get out to watch people work. Many of the ACME members were also NPL members who I got to meet for the first time like Lunch Boy, Chainsaw, and several others. One of the most interesting for me was meeting Tahnan, with whom I've coauthored puzzles in the past. He also helped me out a few months back by testing Museum Piece before I showed it at the Puzzle Party at my house. He was a really nice guy whom I enjoyed talking to whenever he stopped by. (Something he did often; our team captain is his roommate.)
Eventually, other puzzles produced some odd results. The people who watched the Powerpoint questions filled in their answers and got the letters "ED", which turned out not to be the answer. They send someone back and discover that was a red herring, and get the correct answer. The quartermasters were stuck until they realized that the printout they were using didn't show all of the quarters. After they had the full puzzle, they identified all of the states, but all they could get as an answer was the letters "LL". Stuck again. The interlacing had been finished on A Pile of Letters, but nobody could figure out the answer, all we could see were the two letters "TH" in the completed grid.
Luckily, someone noticed that all of the answers we did have had silent letters in them. Arranging them gave us: _O_ALB_. Cazique joked that the answer was "Total B.S." Everyone laughed. Someone noticed that "Illinois" is a state with a silent S and a double L, which would fit as a the answer to Financial Report. We reach a consensus that, even if "Total B.S." was not the answer, it would be fun to call it in. ("Calling in" is something we did a lot. It's the process of calling into headquarters and asking them to confirm an answer.) So we called. "Total B.S." was correct. We'd solved round one early, and ACME gave us access to the next round of puzzles slightly earlier than scheduled. We were doing well.
So it was a little bit before 4 p.m. on Friday, and we started scanning through the new puzzles. One in particular caught everyone's eye, Company Picnic, aka, the Iron Chef puzzle. A few of us went out to meet with some ACME members to pick out a secret ingredient and to get the materials for Shredded What? Our ingredient was bananas, and several of the more culinarily-minded persons went to Sax's kitchen to bake the required meals. The plastic baggie looked less promising. It turned out to be a large, double-sided, black-and-white sheet of paper . . . shredded into tiny, nearly identical strips. I would get to know these strips very well before the night was over.
But first, let's talk about the field. TK had grabbed a copy of Abducted!, which looked like a series of driving directions. It turned out that it was a series of driving directions, and TK worked diligently and systematically figuring out where they led to. What's Green, Hangs on the Wall, and Whistles? was the traditional scavenger hunt, and the MIT students and locals went straight to work collecting everything. That Mixer was the traditional party (which I went to later). Stairway to Heaven was a music-based puzzle, and
thedan set down on that right away. The Road Signs of Unspeakable Chaos and A Problem with Printing were both very complex programming puzzles. If you've been paying attention, you'll have noticed that the only thing I could be of help with was Shredded What. I went over there and jigsaw-puzzled.After a little while, something odd happened. Sax (before heading home with her Iron Chefs), answered our team phone to hear an unidentified male voice (she was pretty it was Tahnan, though) with the following message: "I'm looking for you, but you're not looking hard enough for me. You left something at the Office," or words to that effect. We have no idea what this means.
So we put together the little bits of paper. Slowly. Cazique notices that one of the images we're putting together is a cover of Red Herring Magazine. Since the introduction to the puzzle instructs us to "ignore any red herrings" we suspect that this is the side of the puzzle we don't need for the answer. As we continue, we find a can of herring in red sauce, a picture of a herring that seems to have been colored in (we presume red), a statuette of The Angry Red Herring from The Tick and a novel called, you guessed it, The Red Herring.
While we're deshredding, TK had solved a puzzle, but didn't know what to do with it. The directions he was looking at apparently led from MIT to the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan. So how did that lead to an answer? Well, the introduction talked about something dangling above someone at the final destination. "What would dangle above the Embassy of Kyrgyzstan?" I asked. "The flag of Kyrgyzstan," I thought. So we looked up the flag of Kyrgyzstan. And it was very much a flag. Of Kyrgyzstan. At this point, we look at the structure of Round 2, which was a bit unorthodox. It seemed possible that the answer might actually be "The Flag of Kyrgyzstan." So TK calls it in, and is told that we can't simply say "The Flag of Kyrgyzstan," someone from ACME has to actually see the answer. Someone stops by and TK shows them a picture from our almanac. Our first round two answer is confirmed. And a trend is set for this round. Instead of words or phrases, the answers are pictures and, later, objects.
Spelvin has finished reconstructed the musical passage of Stairway to Heaven. He began to play it in the hopes that anyone might recognize it. He would do this for the next twelve hours.
So I did some more with shredded paper.
We got another mysterious phone call. Apparently, we weren't looking at "the big picture" and needed to go deeper. Again, we didn't know what this means.
More shredded paper.
The cooks came back and prepared a marvelous dinner for some ACME judges. Food was set on fire. Woo! We received our second Round 2 answer, a slice of a chocolate orange.
Still more shredded paper. At this point, we've got quite a lot of the big stuff put together, but an ACME representative confirms that we have to finish up the rest. Woo. Hoo.
Seven thirty rolls around, and I joined the group going to That Mixer. This was exciting for me since it meant I got to meet more NPL people. On our way over, we turned into one big group consisting of ACRONYM, SNAFU fans and Setec Astronomy. We learned that everyone seems to be having big troubles with this Hunt, but everyone's also having a good time. At the party, I met a good number of people and spent time talking to them. I spent less time getting involved with the game events spread across the room. There were four games, Boggle, Reverse Spelling Bee, Oreo Stacking and Big Dumb Five (a sort of bluffing game). A team member had to win each of the games to play the final game in the sekrit area. While Cazique kicked ass at most every game, I got to talk to Kray from Setec Astronomy, whom I knew from the LA NPL parties he'd been to. I also got to meet G Natural, Squonk and Ucaoimhu. In the end, my team finally got to play the last game, Memory, that nets us our third answer, a slice of pizza.
We walked back to headquarters, and Round Three had been released.
By now, I was very tired. I went into the sleeping room and took a nap. By the time I woke up, the Hunt had exploded.
To be continued . . .
no subject
The turnip team was actually Pturnips, but close enough.
The "corporate theme" was indeed intended to look like a very dull theme, so that you'd be surprised when you learned the real theme of the hunt: murder mystery. (Heh heh heh.)
The comments about me: er, thanks! Hi. And yes, HQ was a little small, and a little boring; but a lot of the fun of running the hunt was visiting other teams. First, it meant meeting people, which was always fun, and you don't get to do it nearly as much when you're solving. Second, it meant getting to watch people solve what you wrote, which (as you may know from Museum Piece) is a whole lot of fun. So yeah. (Also, it wasn't just that my roommate was on ACRONYM that brought me by so often; I made a pretty regular circuit of teams when I went visiting.)
And yes, that was indeed me calling to say "I'm looking for you." I think the exact phrasing we used was "You found something interesting at the office, but you haven't put the pieces together." Teams understood this to varying degrees....
I'm looking forward to the next installment. It's nice to see people's reactions (even negative reactions) to something like that, that you put so much work into.