![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Part . . . III?
The 2004 MIT Mystery Hunt is mere weeks away. What does that mean? Well, it means I should probably finish writing up last year's Hunt.
When last we joined our hero (viz. me), I had just called in the correct answer to WIK Doctoring. This was sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning. The night gets fuzzy for me. And for everyone else.
After finishing Doctoring, I did some work on WIK Subtraction. This was my least favorite puzzle of the hunt. I've gone back and read the solution page several times, but unlike other difficult or confusing puzzles, it still makes no sense to me. Later, the answer was publicly revealed to all teams via e-mail due to minor errors and, apparently, the wave of people not solving it by Monday morning. Regardless, after learning a lot about obscure sports figures and minor politicians,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
thedan sat down next to me and began working on something. Eventually he'd stop and ask for corporate-speak with particular syllables. I asked what he was doing, and it turned out he was working on one of the puzzles from Round Four. Oh right. The puzzles keep coming, goodie.
Well,thedan's puzzle was a goodie, and definitely a Morale Booster. Each team had to compose a song in a style determined by an online Magic 8 Ball. ACRONYM had been psychically charged to write a college fight song. thedan worked on this, writing it mostly by himself with occasional help. Then a bunch of us got together to perform. During a practice, somebody, inspired by thedan's continued playing of the solution melody from Stairway to Heaven, thought it would be funny to tack a musical-quote-cum-hint-plea to the end of our song. The suggester may have been me. Anyway, I was the one who got to sing it. Thankfully, our lyric sheet has been recorded online, so you too can read "The Acme University Fight Song". The first verse is the slow, glee-club-alma-matery part of the song, which then degenerates into the raucus game-screaming song. In fact, I think we may have put a drum solo in between those two parts to make sure our song was long enough. And you can also see my solo line at the end, which I sang in my strangest Led-Zeppelin-parody voice. I'm particularly pleased that the overly enunciated pause between the two syllables became a part of the written version. (Other teams' songs are also available. My favorite (other than the fight song) is SNAFUFans' Calypso song.)
At headquarters, in the wee hours of the night, I looked at some of the other Round Four puzzles. Many of these wouldn't be solved until the next day, for various reasons. Dealing with Change was a difficult crossword that got torn down by Slik and Wombat pretty early on, though the final answer didn't come until much later because of a few oversights. Sneakers was a campus runaround done in sound. From what I was told of this puzzle by the MIT students who solved it, it was very well done, making use of a number of MIT campus audio oddities. One of my most memorable moments of dumbfounded awe occurred when someone, listening to the recording of someone walking around campus, managed to identify the path midway through because "there is only one elevator button on campus that sounds like that." The path was followed pretty quickly, but the significance of the morse code track wasn't discovered until later.
Efficiency was a word puzzle we shafted with our ability to find red herrings; String Theory was a 4-D maze I knew nothing about; and Light Reading was a Cambridge runaround that I presume was solved by locals or people more willing to go outside in the very cold weather. Going Nuts was a very large paint-by-numbers that was immediately snapped up by two team members who had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the PBN puzzle. The result was a very large and confusing and unhelpful mess of squares. While I was asleep, later, somebody thought to turn it into a jigsaw and miraculously turned it into a squirrel.
Three Square Meals became the white while of one solver (Jenn, I think) who worked on it constantly. I think she actually listened to the MP3 of seemingly random sounds more often thanthedan played the Stairway to Heaven tune, if that's even possible. I don't know how she did it, but a day later, the Aha! moment came and she had the answer. Everyone else was confused, but she loved it.
The only puzzle I did any work on for Round Four was Cover Story, which asked solvers to identify the children's book from the illustration. I was proud of being able to accurately identify Bridge to Terebitha from the abstract, yet somehow very evocative construction-paper drawing. Later on, I managed to fill in some blanks by reading through lists of recommended books, and I was able to get a guess as to the answer, although I didn't have enough faith in it to phone it in. Later, we tried it and it was right. I did this on another puzzle too, where I doubted myself on a guess. If I have a New Hunt Year's resolution, it's to be less careful around those types of things. I mean, a guess is a guess, and the worst that's going to happen is that I'll get taunted and mocked by the Hunt organizers. And really, I'd prefer to waste their time than my team's time or remember a new puzzle with awkward regret.
At about three a.m., I took some personal time to check my journal and my e-mail. I was feeling like I'd run out my usefulness and there just wasn't anything I could help at. It also seemed like the team wasn't doing very well. We'd been feeling like we were dragging before we took the red pill, and now it seemed like there was more than we could ever hope to catch up with. First, I leave a cryptic message alluding to the theme at 3:20. Then I check my e-mail to find a message from Acme Headquarters announcing that the next round of puzzles will be delayed by two hours because several teams are having trouble coping with the puzzle load. It was a slight reprieve, but in hindsight, it was also the first sign that the Hunt was not going as Acme had hoped. At about 3:30, I ask for messages of support.
What happened the rest of that night? I don't know. Some puzzle stuff I guess.
At 6:00 a.m, Acme released Round Five. They also released their first official hints. The hints actually aren't that startling, and aren't much different than the kinds of nudges one might be able to get by an Acme member who's been roped into a brainstorming session. But when I read those hints out loud to some other teamates, one of them was a like a glorious nuclear-powered Maglite illuminating our mind. "You are fairly unlikely to recognize this piece of music by *sound*; however, many of you may have *seen* this piece of music before," was the hint. The puzzle, Stairway to Heaven. Immediately, several people knew where the answer was, in the stairway (get it!) of the music library.
The Round Five Puzzles didn't get much work done on them yet, or at least I didn't look at them quite yet. In fact, what happened next in my mind didn't happen until much later according to Acme's logs, but I'm going to write it up here anyway, because it felt like it was around now. You see, we now had quite a lot of the Round Two answers finished. In a sense, we had all of them. Our problems were that one of the answers, the picture from Shredded What? was still unidentified. The other problem was that we didn't know how to "train" the answer to A Problem with Printing. Remember Training? All those "Whoa--I Know _____" puzzles had instructions that had to be applied to certain answers. We had successfully trained one answer, Stairway to Heaven. The long sought answer was a B-flat quarter note. The introduction to Stairway to Heaven mentioned "surgical precision," so this puzzle needed to be "trained" by the answer to Whoa--I Know Doctoring. ("Surgical." "Doctor." Get it?). Of course, we already knew that the training instruction was "HALVE," which made perfect sense with our musical answer, turning the quarter note into an eighth note.
The identification problem got cleared up when we the entire team gathered around a visiting Acme member for a brainstorming session about what the letters B, D and S might stand for in the picture. After a long discussion, we eventually had it confirmed that they stood for "Breakfast," "Dinner" and "Supper." You can imagine that everyone leaped onto computer to ply Google with this new information, but apparently I was the only one with the skillz to come up with the answer. "K-Rations!" I cried upon seeing the Google results, which was confirmed when I saw a picture that was much like this one. The Acme member confirmed our answer, and we were one step closer to solving round two.
After a while, a few of us thought that we might have enough information to solve the puzzle. The set-up of the round seemed to indicate that we were looking at a Pic-Tac-Toe. These puzzle appear in Games magazine every once in a while and feature nine pictures arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid. The challenge is to find a way in that each row of three pictures has something in common. We believed that our job was to arrange our answers so that they, plus the Round Two answer, would make a similar grid. We started with the fairly logical hypothesis that the Round answer would be in the middle and began arranging our answers in the eight outer squares. There were three of us that I remember: me, Zack and Jenn. We quickly realized that if we took our untrained answer and changed the colors to their complements, we ended up with a red-and-yellow flower, which fit in with two other red-and-yellow objects, a piece of pizza and the flag of Kyrgyzstan. (We would later find out that, although this worked, it was completely the wrong training answer.) With these three and the other five answers (a slice of chocolate orange, the K-Rations, the road sign from the programming puzzle, the B-flat eighth note and a picture of Neil Armstrong on the MIT Dome), we began to solve. Gentle readers, this was the height of team solving. With the actual materials in front of us, we began maneuvering the answers around the grid according to our own pet theories. Everyone had an idea that they thought was more likely than others, but together we worked until we had a setup that accommodated all of them. When we finally reached an setup we could all agree with, we tried to reason out what would go in the middle. "So we're looking for something kind of three-dimensionally round. It is an eight of something. And it begins with the letter 'K'."
"KRESGE!"
That was Jenn, MIT student and former MIT tour guide, shouting, by the way. Other MIT students immediately understood while Jenn explained to we dumbfounded rest that Kresge was the name of a building on campus that was architecturally significant because it is shaped like one eighth of a sphere. It is also a theater, which was the theme of the round. (It also, apparently, has tripartite symmetry, the final identity from the grid that we never understood. Acme kindly arranged the completed grid on their answer page, but our flower had the colors reversed due to mistraining.) Jenn received the honors of calling in the answer. She was shaking. Or maybe I was shaking. There was definitely shakage. The team held its breath as she answered "Kresge." There was a horrible pause. Then she gave us the thumbs up as she continued to listen to the operator. We cheered like we had never cheered before.
At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, ACRONYM was the first team to solve the Round Two Metapuzzle, almost twenty-three hours after solving Round One. We didn't know that we were the first until later, but we did know that the Hunt was beatable. (We also later found out that Acme had been cheering when we called in the answer too. With so many teams being cowed by the number of puzzles, it was a sign that the teams were catching up.) Things really started to look up for us after that, well, look up for me, at least. It was a bright (if freezing cold) day, and ACRONYM was finally on its way.
The next day, when I was walking through the freezing cold trying to let my mind rest, I saw Kresge, walked over to it and marveled at its eighth-of-a-sphereness. I realized, out in the snow, looking through the window at the locked lobby, that the moment of solving Round Two would be the highlight of the Hunt for me, even if we later found the Coin. Watching all the pieces come together, solving as a team, and arriving at an answer that was not merely a clever collection of letters or sounds or ideas, but an actual thing. A place. A part of MIT that I could take away with me. In fact, when I go back for the 2004 Hunt in a couple of weeks, I can tell that at some point, I'm going to walk by Kresge and rest beside it, like an old friend.
SunNYTX: 23. Wow, I didn't know you could put that in the NYT.
When last we joined our hero (viz. me), I had just called in the correct answer to WIK Doctoring. This was sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning. The night gets fuzzy for me. And for everyone else.
After finishing Doctoring, I did some work on WIK Subtraction. This was my least favorite puzzle of the hunt. I've gone back and read the solution page several times, but unlike other difficult or confusing puzzles, it still makes no sense to me. Later, the answer was publicly revealed to all teams via e-mail due to minor errors and, apparently, the wave of people not solving it by Monday morning. Regardless, after learning a lot about obscure sports figures and minor politicians,
thedan sat down next to me and began working on something. Eventually he'd stop and ask for corporate-speak with particular syllables. I asked what he was doing, and it turned out he was working on one of the puzzles from Round Four. Oh right. The puzzles keep coming, goodie.Well,
thedan's puzzle was a goodie, and definitely a Morale Booster. Each team had to compose a song in a style determined by an online Magic 8 Ball. ACRONYM had been psychically charged to write a college fight song. thedan worked on this, writing it mostly by himself with occasional help. Then a bunch of us got together to perform. During a practice, somebody, inspired by thedan's continued playing of the solution melody from Stairway to Heaven, thought it would be funny to tack a musical-quote-cum-hint-plea to the end of our song. The suggester may have been me. Anyway, I was the one who got to sing it. Thankfully, our lyric sheet has been recorded online, so you too can read "The Acme University Fight Song". The first verse is the slow, glee-club-alma-matery part of the song, which then degenerates into the raucus game-screaming song. In fact, I think we may have put a drum solo in between those two parts to make sure our song was long enough. And you can also see my solo line at the end, which I sang in my strangest Led-Zeppelin-parody voice. I'm particularly pleased that the overly enunciated pause between the two syllables became a part of the written version. (Other teams' songs are also available. My favorite (other than the fight song) is SNAFUFans' Calypso song.)At headquarters, in the wee hours of the night, I looked at some of the other Round Four puzzles. Many of these wouldn't be solved until the next day, for various reasons. Dealing with Change was a difficult crossword that got torn down by Slik and Wombat pretty early on, though the final answer didn't come until much later because of a few oversights. Sneakers was a campus runaround done in sound. From what I was told of this puzzle by the MIT students who solved it, it was very well done, making use of a number of MIT campus audio oddities. One of my most memorable moments of dumbfounded awe occurred when someone, listening to the recording of someone walking around campus, managed to identify the path midway through because "there is only one elevator button on campus that sounds like that." The path was followed pretty quickly, but the significance of the morse code track wasn't discovered until later.
Efficiency was a word puzzle we shafted with our ability to find red herrings; String Theory was a 4-D maze I knew nothing about; and Light Reading was a Cambridge runaround that I presume was solved by locals or people more willing to go outside in the very cold weather. Going Nuts was a very large paint-by-numbers that was immediately snapped up by two team members who had been eagerly awaiting the arrival of the PBN puzzle. The result was a very large and confusing and unhelpful mess of squares. While I was asleep, later, somebody thought to turn it into a jigsaw and miraculously turned it into a squirrel.
Three Square Meals became the white while of one solver (Jenn, I think) who worked on it constantly. I think she actually listened to the MP3 of seemingly random sounds more often than
thedan played the Stairway to Heaven tune, if that's even possible. I don't know how she did it, but a day later, the Aha! moment came and she had the answer. Everyone else was confused, but she loved it.The only puzzle I did any work on for Round Four was Cover Story, which asked solvers to identify the children's book from the illustration. I was proud of being able to accurately identify Bridge to Terebitha from the abstract, yet somehow very evocative construction-paper drawing. Later on, I managed to fill in some blanks by reading through lists of recommended books, and I was able to get a guess as to the answer, although I didn't have enough faith in it to phone it in. Later, we tried it and it was right. I did this on another puzzle too, where I doubted myself on a guess. If I have a New Hunt Year's resolution, it's to be less careful around those types of things. I mean, a guess is a guess, and the worst that's going to happen is that I'll get taunted and mocked by the Hunt organizers. And really, I'd prefer to waste their time than my team's time or remember a new puzzle with awkward regret.
At about three a.m., I took some personal time to check my journal and my e-mail. I was feeling like I'd run out my usefulness and there just wasn't anything I could help at. It also seemed like the team wasn't doing very well. We'd been feeling like we were dragging before we took the red pill, and now it seemed like there was more than we could ever hope to catch up with. First, I leave a cryptic message alluding to the theme at 3:20. Then I check my e-mail to find a message from Acme Headquarters announcing that the next round of puzzles will be delayed by two hours because several teams are having trouble coping with the puzzle load. It was a slight reprieve, but in hindsight, it was also the first sign that the Hunt was not going as Acme had hoped. At about 3:30, I ask for messages of support.
What happened the rest of that night? I don't know. Some puzzle stuff I guess.
At 6:00 a.m, Acme released Round Five. They also released their first official hints. The hints actually aren't that startling, and aren't much different than the kinds of nudges one might be able to get by an Acme member who's been roped into a brainstorming session. But when I read those hints out loud to some other teamates, one of them was a like a glorious nuclear-powered Maglite illuminating our mind. "You are fairly unlikely to recognize this piece of music by *sound*; however, many of you may have *seen* this piece of music before," was the hint. The puzzle, Stairway to Heaven. Immediately, several people knew where the answer was, in the stairway (get it!) of the music library.
The Round Five Puzzles didn't get much work done on them yet, or at least I didn't look at them quite yet. In fact, what happened next in my mind didn't happen until much later according to Acme's logs, but I'm going to write it up here anyway, because it felt like it was around now. You see, we now had quite a lot of the Round Two answers finished. In a sense, we had all of them. Our problems were that one of the answers, the picture from Shredded What? was still unidentified. The other problem was that we didn't know how to "train" the answer to A Problem with Printing. Remember Training? All those "Whoa--I Know _____" puzzles had instructions that had to be applied to certain answers. We had successfully trained one answer, Stairway to Heaven. The long sought answer was a B-flat quarter note. The introduction to Stairway to Heaven mentioned "surgical precision," so this puzzle needed to be "trained" by the answer to Whoa--I Know Doctoring. ("Surgical." "Doctor." Get it?). Of course, we already knew that the training instruction was "HALVE," which made perfect sense with our musical answer, turning the quarter note into an eighth note.
The identification problem got cleared up when we the entire team gathered around a visiting Acme member for a brainstorming session about what the letters B, D and S might stand for in the picture. After a long discussion, we eventually had it confirmed that they stood for "Breakfast," "Dinner" and "Supper." You can imagine that everyone leaped onto computer to ply Google with this new information, but apparently I was the only one with the skillz to come up with the answer. "K-Rations!" I cried upon seeing the Google results, which was confirmed when I saw a picture that was much like this one. The Acme member confirmed our answer, and we were one step closer to solving round two.
After a while, a few of us thought that we might have enough information to solve the puzzle. The set-up of the round seemed to indicate that we were looking at a Pic-Tac-Toe. These puzzle appear in Games magazine every once in a while and feature nine pictures arranged in a tic-tac-toe grid. The challenge is to find a way in that each row of three pictures has something in common. We believed that our job was to arrange our answers so that they, plus the Round Two answer, would make a similar grid. We started with the fairly logical hypothesis that the Round answer would be in the middle and began arranging our answers in the eight outer squares. There were three of us that I remember: me, Zack and Jenn. We quickly realized that if we took our untrained answer and changed the colors to their complements, we ended up with a red-and-yellow flower, which fit in with two other red-and-yellow objects, a piece of pizza and the flag of Kyrgyzstan. (We would later find out that, although this worked, it was completely the wrong training answer.) With these three and the other five answers (a slice of chocolate orange, the K-Rations, the road sign from the programming puzzle, the B-flat eighth note and a picture of Neil Armstrong on the MIT Dome), we began to solve. Gentle readers, this was the height of team solving. With the actual materials in front of us, we began maneuvering the answers around the grid according to our own pet theories. Everyone had an idea that they thought was more likely than others, but together we worked until we had a setup that accommodated all of them. When we finally reached an setup we could all agree with, we tried to reason out what would go in the middle. "So we're looking for something kind of three-dimensionally round. It is an eight of something. And it begins with the letter 'K'."
"KRESGE!"
That was Jenn, MIT student and former MIT tour guide, shouting, by the way. Other MIT students immediately understood while Jenn explained to we dumbfounded rest that Kresge was the name of a building on campus that was architecturally significant because it is shaped like one eighth of a sphere. It is also a theater, which was the theme of the round. (It also, apparently, has tripartite symmetry, the final identity from the grid that we never understood. Acme kindly arranged the completed grid on their answer page, but our flower had the colors reversed due to mistraining.) Jenn received the honors of calling in the answer. She was shaking. Or maybe I was shaking. There was definitely shakage. The team held its breath as she answered "Kresge." There was a horrible pause. Then she gave us the thumbs up as she continued to listen to the operator. We cheered like we had never cheered before.
At 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, ACRONYM was the first team to solve the Round Two Metapuzzle, almost twenty-three hours after solving Round One. We didn't know that we were the first until later, but we did know that the Hunt was beatable. (We also later found out that Acme had been cheering when we called in the answer too. With so many teams being cowed by the number of puzzles, it was a sign that the teams were catching up.) Things really started to look up for us after that, well, look up for me, at least. It was a bright (if freezing cold) day, and ACRONYM was finally on its way.
The next day, when I was walking through the freezing cold trying to let my mind rest, I saw Kresge, walked over to it and marveled at its eighth-of-a-sphereness. I realized, out in the snow, looking through the window at the locked lobby, that the moment of solving Round Two would be the highlight of the Hunt for me, even if we later found the Coin. Watching all the pieces come together, solving as a team, and arriving at an answer that was not merely a clever collection of letters or sounds or ideas, but an actual thing. A place. A part of MIT that I could take away with me. In fact, when I go back for the 2004 Hunt in a couple of weeks, I can tell that at some point, I'm going to walk by Kresge and rest beside it, like an old friend.
SunNYTX: 23. Wow, I didn't know you could put that in the NYT.
no subject
no subject
no subject
It is so heartening to hear people's stories about that Hunt and realize that they did indeed have fun. I'm glad you enjoyed it. :)
See you in a couple of weeks.
no subject
I was thinking of last year's hunt (because, you know, the hunt starts in fourteen hours) and for some reason I searched for "mystery hunt" kyrgyzstan - I rather liked the flag-of-Kyrgyzstan puzzle because somehow upon looking those directions I knew the location was in Washington, and it came to mind earlier today - and found this series of entries.
And these narratives are bringing back memories. I didn't realize how much of the hunt was still there in my mind from a year ago.