tablesaw | Still Angry.

So, some people are have been softening their words, but I'm going to come right out and bluntly say that I hated this year's MIT Mystery Hunt. Yes, I enjoyed spending time with my team and the people in New York and Boston during my vacation surrounding, but if I could have the fifty hours or so I spent staring at those puzzles I'd grab them in a second.

I've been trying to write up my thoughts and opinions on this Hunt, and it's been difficult, because sometimes I just get too angry writing, and I lose my focus.

If you examined the Hunt minutely, you might come to the impression that the things that were wrong were minor. But each of those minor things had a major impact, and the things that were bad, unsatisfying and unfair overshadowed what was fun and well-designed, even if it did not outweigh them.

The entry I started writing today is titled "Skinned Knees on the Marathon Trail." I like comparing the Mystery Hunt to a marathon. They're both very strenuous, but very rewarding tests of endurance. But the marathon works because it is pure running over a long period of time. The route is clearly marked, the path is clear, and supplies are freely available along the way. Any non-running distraction. The amount of screw-ups, gaffes, miscommunications and awkward logic made this Hunt feel less like a marthon and more like a very, very, very long, haphazard obstacle course. I felt like I was dealing more with route directions and potholes in the road than with actual running.

I've saved a draft of what I've been writing, and I'll come back to it soon, but for now, I think that a lot of my attitude is summed up in this excerpt:

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

If there was one thing that got my very angry (not frustrated or disappointed, but actually angry) it was misinformation. This started when, in advance of the Hunt, Kappa Sig! promised on the web page that the Hunt would end before Sunday evening, even if they had to rehide the coin in the headquarters of one of the teams. (The exact quote, along with the Kappa Sig! pre-Hunt pages are no longer linked.) The Hunt very certainly didn't end before Sunday evening. I realize that this was hyperbole, but it expressed a certain commitment to a quick Hunt that I counted on when, for example, I made plans to meet up with friends in Boston on Sunday night. It seemed to be a statement by the organizers that they were aware of the danger of running a Hunt that is too large, too complicated and/or too difficult and were going to err on the side of caution and ease. It indicated that there were contingency plans to make hinting easier early on.

It doesn't seem to me that any of these things happened. I feel lied to. Not fun.

And during the Hunt, especially at the outset, there were examples of confusion, contradiction and misinformation. Phone operators told team members one thing and then another. This, combined with a permeating sense of non-fair-dealing in the puzzles themselves led to rampant second-guessing of the organizers. And then there was The Commodore's Final Voyage, but I'll get to that.

It wasn't too long into Friday night that I and much of my team began to lose faith in Kappa Sig!. We didn't wholly trust their clues; we didn't wholly trust their hints; we didn't wholly trust anything that came from them. By Saturday night, I'd written them off completely. I stopped caring what the answers were, because too many of them had been unsatisfying. And I began to hate the French Armada for continually wasting my time and the time of my teammates with whom I could have been playing Apples to Apples.

More eventually, including the stuff I liked.

FriNYTX: 19. ThuNYTX: 8:45. Written by

canadianpuzzler. What very good taste. You! Go solve it now!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I think my favorite moment of solving The Commodore's Final Voyage was when we placed all the words we had, and one of the rows read:
****AMBUSH (because, really, who's going to solve a jigsaw without anything to go on; once we were told that it was the same "image" repeated three times, it became possible, but before that, no way).

Naturally, we placed SUBMARINE in the grid, reading backward, and began backsolving to an eight-letter word ending in ENIR. After we had called in SOUVENIR for four or five different puzzles, we had a long discussion with the French Armada, the upshot of which was that they had no idea what we were doing, and we should probably stop.

I was surprised to hear how down you were when we talked on the phone. It really surprised me because of the contrast from before you went, to that moment when you were tired, it was the middle of the night, and you still had a way to go.

Are you still considering next year? Or are you going to decide after some time has passed?

I'm working my way slowly through the recently-posted solutions, and so far, if I were editing these puzzles, I would want to make changes in at least half the puzzles. I agree with you completely about the loss of faith in Kappa Sig (which came so early, as the Pirates round is especially error-ridden): I think there are a number of good puzzles on which teams foundered because there were so many bad puzzles that one stopped trusting any of them.

There is enough material here for a book on how not to write Mystery Hunt puzzles.

I think the oversight I found the most surprising in the Pirates round was that they had hoped teams would be solving it in somewhere between a few and several hours and opening up another round. But the meta (in fact, nearly all the metas) was essentially unbacksolveable and one of the puzzles (The Parrrty) was impossible to solve until somewhere in the 9 PM - 11 PM range. So that puzzle was a structural stumbling block to their hoped for timeframe. Not because it was too hard, but because it contributed to preventing access to all subsequent puzzles and wasn't even available until after about ten hours had passed. Puzzles that are too hard I can chalk up to a failure of judgment or a lack of experience, but to me this indicates a breakdown of basic logic.

Wow. The Parrrrrty limitation never even occurred to me. Very good point!

I don't remember which puzzles in the Pirates round opened up which other puzzles -- was the Parrrty necessary to get to the jumping-off point? If so, that's just terrible planning.

The Pirates round just had so many puzzles that were either dismal or excruciatingly hard (ATWP; First to the Doubloons, where 80% of the work is irrelevant to the puzzle; Too Precious for Words, solved by 9 teams in 68 hours; On the Briny Deep; May This Ember Glow; Genteel Sailor), it set a lousy tone for the weekend.

Reading the solutions is making me angry all over again. There are little details that set me off: in the solution to Lawman (http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/04/yukon/hr0/answer.html), solved by only three teams, the author writes "Blah. If people haven't read much recently, well, they lose. This is why the puzzle will either be very hard or very easy, depending." A sort of willful disregard towards whether or not the puzzle is solvable.
In the solution to Tlazoteotl's Codex (http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/04/aztec/IT7/answer.html), the comment that "To determine the proper letter: Each of the sentences corresponds to one of the monologues, as listed in the book, The Vagina Monologues, not the play. (This is important as "The Vulva Club" is not performed and "I asked a six-year-old girl:" is generally titled "A six-year-old girl was asked" in scripts. Because of this, the solver really needs to go out and find a copy of the book.)" -- when, for crying out loud, the meat of the puzzle (the actresses) is about the play, not the book, so on a whim you're just forcing people to do extra work. The typo in Mud-Soled Lubber ("now" in the wordlist should be "not"), a puzzle where a single wrong word is a serious error, suggesting that no one bothered to test solve it carefully.

Grr.

I don't recall whether The Parrrty opened up any other puzzles. I don't think we solved it until after the entire island had been made available. The problem was that you couldn't get off the first island until Commodore had been solved (at least, that was the intent). That meant that, unless you wanted to stay on the first island until after Nite Owl, you had to solve Commodore without that solution word. As Cazique points out, it didn't contribute much to the answer, but it's an additional stumbling block that there is absolutely no getting around. Making participants guess at solution letters (R?? OF RELIQUARY) is one thing when they haven't solved the associated puzzle. Making participants guess at solution letters because the associated puzzle doesn't exist yet is another.

The problem was that you couldn't get off the first island until Commodore had been solved (at least, that was the intent).

I'm confused -- why would solving Commodore have anything to do with getting off the first island? I'm positive that we (Setec) received Jumping Ship, and jumped through that timehole, long before we solved Commodore.

ACRONYM also managed to get out of island one before solving the Meta and before the time hole was divinely activated. However, I also cannot remember which puzzle or puzzle chain led to it.

Yeah, we got a puzzle that gave us the time hole... about 5 minutes before it was "divinely" opened. that seemed to happen a lot.

i never thought about that either. however, to be fair, only one letter of the important parts of the Commodore grid was in the answer to The Parrrty, so with most other answers it COULD have been backsolved. in fact, i'm not sure we even had everything when we finally solved it.

the most problematic problems with Commodore were the faulty hint-giving and the continuous is-it-or-isn't-it on whether the puzzle was broken, which (as i've carped before) cost three of us some significant puzzling time. ah well.

Still Angry.

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