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High Hunt.
As you may have guessed, I had a good vacation. So good that I didn't have time to write or record posts. The highlights were many, but I'm going to talk about the highlights of the 2005 MIT Mystery Hunt. Note that the site there doesn't include a link to this year's puzzles, which are at normalville.org. I don't feel like doing an in-depth write-up of puzzles or progress, just some of my favorite moments. These contain spoilers for Alma Mater, An Ax to Grind, Cocktail Party, 1-1=2, Special Art Exhibition, Express Yourself, Post Modern, Parallel Universe, and the Red Metapuzzle.
First Solution
I was part of the group that worked on Shift Break, the first puzzle ACRONYM solved. It was also apparently the first correct answer called in. Woo!
El Google, Part 1
Next, I worked on Alma Mater. I broke into it by finding the right phrase to put into Google: "Everything is a test . . ." This search pulled up a bunch of sites for The Recruit. That wasn't what I was looking for, but reading the flavor text, I decided to check a hunch. It was quickly confirmed that one of the characters in the film was an MIT alum. Score!
I suspected that Gordon Freeman would make an appearance in the Hunt this year, so I felt bad that I didn't recognize him in this puzzle. Obviously I need to play the game a bit more.
I Met a Man . . .
ACRONYM keyed into the idea that the Red answers were names of musicians pretty quickly, so I decided to see if we had enough to solve the round. When I checked, we did. The names of the answers' bands formed an acrostic of "time travel." I got to call it in too. Hooray!
I Didn't Even See It At one point, someone came up and asked if either![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cramerica or I could identify a song. He then proceed to sing a guitar solo, which I identified as part of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. This was apparently part of An Ax to Grind, though I didn't know it until long after the Hunt was over. I just liked the way the exchange happened. Normally, those kinds of questions get shouted out about trivia or word definitions. It was awesome that a musical puzzle could be accurately communicated in the same way.
My Kind of People
At various points during the Hunt, while out of headquarters for various reasons, I saw teams solving From A to B. They were pretty easy to spot, since they were generally aremed with lengths of string and measuring tape. Personally, I backsolved the puzzle while our team was out measuring. I'm still not quite clear to what extent they used the backsolve and to what extent they used the frontsolve.
Enigmatology
With quite a few NPLers on Setec, it's unsurprising that there were some NPL-style wordplay puzzles. 1-1=2 made me groan out load when I got to the old chestnut "there(m)in".
OIC
I need new glasses. It's just a fact of life. I didn't think this would come to haunt me when I went to the main party, but it did. The Special Art Exhibition was packed with people who were all staring at pictures trying to find mistakes in them. Since standing very very close to the paintings wasn't an option, I declared myself useless and began talking to people. I sawjoecab, Al Desuda, and others Sue++. I saw someone who looked like fuldu, but ignored him because, I thought Fuldu wasn't goign to be there. SO I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that the reason the guy looked like Fuldu was that he actually was Fuldu. Yeah, I need to read some journals more closely. I was also surprised by 42itous who recognized me even though I couldn't quite place her. I always feel bad when I can't remember the names of cute girls.
Anyway, eventually I reconnected with the non-useless members of my team who were stuck. Apparently, they'd found mistakes according to a grid and received the message "Ask us for this" but didn't know what to do next. "I've tried asking them for 'this'," bemoanedsaxikath, "but nothing worked." While they separated to canvass the canvases, I took the notebook and started filling in boxes. After ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-syndicated.gif)
heaneyland pointed out that I had some wrong boxes, I showed them the very pretty arrow I'd made. So our team asked for an arrow. Wrong again. So looked at the original painting and saw something in the corner the arrow was pointing to. Because I need glasses, I had to get up kind of close to confirm that it was, in fact, a thumbtack. When I returned, I was made to go ask for it, since everyone else had become tired of asking for the wrong thing.
It is truly wonderful when one becomes useful at something in the Hunt that one should, by all rights, by useless at.
We Love You Chris Morse
ojouchan: The answer is "penises".
ojouchan: You're going to make me spell it?
We Are in Mystery Hunt
I was originally all on board with the idea of going to the Cocktail Party; I imagined that it would be Greg around a piano with other Setechies forcing people to do karaoke. (I'm still waiting for the Karaoke Mystery Hunt Puzzle, by the way.) But as the evening ground on to 2 a.m., I was less enthused. It'd been a long drive through various forms of precipitation to get to Boston that morning, and I was finally starting to feel it. My plan was to perform in Remembering Our Roots, then get some rest. But when our appointment for ROR was postponed till after the party, I relented when Artistry asked me to go with him.
See, the introduction led him to believe that the puzzle would involve noting which words were missing from songs, and he knew I was good at that. So I went off with him. I'm very glad I did. The Cocktail Party was much more fun than the Art Exhibit, and despite a restriction on the number of team members who could attend, the space was much bigger. I firmly believe that more people should have been allowed to see this show. The script is available, but a recording is not.
The show was fantastic. Artistry had been right to drag me along, I knew every song that was performed. And some of the songs were performed really well.thedan's rendition of the Barenaked Ladies' "Alcohol" was particularly fantastic, and had me singing it to myself. This wasn't so good, actually. Thedan had actually sung, "Myst'ry Hunt, my permanent accessory," and "alcohol" was the answer. So I kept wanting to sing "Alcohol" but had to stop, since some people around me hadn't identified the song.
Anyway, as I was writing down the answers, it was clear that the missing words were spelling out an acrostic "ROMANSI". Now, with that beginning, there's pretty much only one place you can go. And with the letter you use, there's also pretty much only one place you can go. So I was immensely pleased when my prediction came true and all of the players joined in with a rendition of "Xanadu Mystery Hunt."
I was the one who first called for an encore. In retrospect, I shouldn't have, since, you know, I had the answer and some others didn't, but I wanted to see it again. Give me a break, I was tired.
I was also standing next tocnoocy during the show, who also got a kick out of Xanadu. In my glee, I started making rollerskating moves in the back of the crowd to crack him up during the encore.
Normalville Remix
For Remembering Our Roots,saxikath, ojouchan, and possibly tmcay wrote a wonderful pageant filled with normality, product placement, and a parody of West Side Story's "Somewhere." However, when we performed it, we were seconds over the time limit. That might not have mattered, except that cutting us off at the five minute mark meant that we didn't get our last sponsor in. The benevolent Town Councilmembers allowed us to try to speed things up to fulfill all of the requirements. However, by the time we got to our song the second time, the Normalville timekeeper indicated that we had four minutes left, exactly the same amount as before. OH NOES! We had to do something to make the song much, much faster, and that's hard to do with "Somewhere." So I came up with a way to indicate to everyone that we needed to be faster. The song went:
Of course, when we were done, we learned that the timekeeper was keeping the wrong time. When he said we had four minutes, we actually had three minutes. But it's better that he made that mistake, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten the chance to hiphoppily embarrass myself.
Wait a sec . . . .
I don't have a copy of the ACRONYM script. Hopefully someone does and can make it available.
Keeping Track
The cross-number of Express Yourself had been done, but nobody knew what else to do with the resulting twelve-digit number. I sat for a while doodling with ideas untilbookishfellow came along to doodle too. Eventually we came to a computer, and Bookishfellow suggested it might be a tracking number for Federal Express. I became as silent as a mouse—a mouse thinking, "I wish I'd thought of that." As I went to the page, Bookishfellow said, "It's probably not, I don't think they have numbers like that." I said nothing, but I continued to the tracking page. Sure enough, we found a package to a likely recipient.
I thought this was a bit of a stretch, so I was surprised to learn from Chris that FedEx tracking numbers are now recognized by Google. I don't know when this information will be useful ever again, but I found it interesting.
We Love Youthedan, Part 1
D3: The Felowship of the Duck
We Love Youthedan, Part 2
At one point, I heard from somebody working on Post Modern that it was a blog puzzle. Made sense; knew there had to be one eventually; moved on. So I was surprised to see it on the Wall of Shame later on. Surely a small puzzle like that would be solved quickly? Well, it was once I got into it. First, Dennis and I spent a little time dithering around on websites. This led us, and probably many others, tonormalville. "I totally mock this 14-year-old," said Dennis, earning him a place on the Wall of Quotes. We spent some time trying to convince Dennis to AIM this person. I didn't think it would be very fruitful, but I knew it would be funny. Sadly, she was not online at the time. It was about then that I saw that the original word-search grid had only been half-heartedly solved. We quickly finished it off and found the answer in thedan's journal. By the time we got to it, the Great LJ Power Outage that undoubtedly gave Dan several small heart attacks was over. I called Setec headquarters, and had a conversation somethign like this:thedan, Part 3
At one point, Thedan answered the phone with a Normalville scat. Rawk.
El Google, Part 2
Whilecramerica worked on King Philip, I was ostensibly working on something else. But I got the main Aha for the puzzle with another lucky Google search.
Fifteen Minutes of Fame
My only appearance on the Acronym Wall of Quotes:
We Love Youojouchan
T3H CU73N355
Bridging the Gap
I ended up spearheading the final half of work on Parallel Universe. By the time I picked it up, it had been sitting on the Wall of Shame for a while. Someone earlier had picked up on a Bridge connection, but couldn't make anythign work. I'd avoided it since I knew nothing about Bridge, but as the Hunt wore on, I figured I'd look at it anyway. It was, in fact, a Bridge puzzle that involved many things about the scoring of Bridge. I learned much about Bridge while solving this puzzle. It was a great ordeal, and I'd be happy to go into great detail, but it would probably be very boring. But I'll skip to the end, when we had everything figured out and were pulling a final answer out round by round.
The final message was "ANSWER DECKHOUSE", but because of some minor mistakes we ended up with the phrase "AFSVER DECKHOURE". This was close enough to get the answer, but at the beginning, things weren't looking good. When TK and I had only the letters "AFSV" we both wanted to keep going because we were sure what we were doing was right in general. TK tried very hard to make these letters work though:
Hopefully, soon, I'll have some time to right about the not-so-high points, as well as address more abstract issues of puzzle construction. Till then, some recommendations. Keep in mind that I haven't gotten a real good look at all of the puzzles yet.
First Solution
I was part of the group that worked on Shift Break, the first puzzle ACRONYM solved. It was also apparently the first correct answer called in. Woo!
El Google, Part 1
Next, I worked on Alma Mater. I broke into it by finding the right phrase to put into Google: "Everything is a test . . ." This search pulled up a bunch of sites for The Recruit. That wasn't what I was looking for, but reading the flavor text, I decided to check a hunch. It was quickly confirmed that one of the characters in the film was an MIT alum. Score!
I suspected that Gordon Freeman would make an appearance in the Hunt this year, so I felt bad that I didn't recognize him in this puzzle. Obviously I need to play the game a bit more.
I Met a Man . . .
ACRONYM keyed into the idea that the Red answers were names of musicians pretty quickly, so I decided to see if we had enough to solve the round. When I checked, we did. The names of the answers' bands formed an acrostic of "time travel." I got to call it in too. Hooray!
I Didn't Even See It At one point, someone came up and asked if either
cramerica or I could identify a song. He then proceed to sing a guitar solo, which I identified as part of "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden. This was apparently part of An Ax to Grind, though I didn't know it until long after the Hunt was over. I just liked the way the exchange happened. Normally, those kinds of questions get shouted out about trivia or word definitions. It was awesome that a musical puzzle could be accurately communicated in the same way.My Kind of People
At various points during the Hunt, while out of headquarters for various reasons, I saw teams solving From A to B. They were pretty easy to spot, since they were generally aremed with lengths of string and measuring tape. Personally, I backsolved the puzzle while our team was out measuring. I'm still not quite clear to what extent they used the backsolve and to what extent they used the frontsolve.
Enigmatology
With quite a few NPLers on Setec, it's unsurprising that there were some NPL-style wordplay puzzles. 1-1=2 made me groan out load when I got to the old chestnut "there(m)in".
OIC
I need new glasses. It's just a fact of life. I didn't think this would come to haunt me when I went to the main party, but it did. The Special Art Exhibition was packed with people who were all staring at pictures trying to find mistakes in them. Since standing very very close to the paintings wasn't an option, I declared myself useless and began talking to people. I saw
joecab, Al Desuda, and others Sue++. I saw someone who looked like fuldu, but ignored him because, I thought Fuldu wasn't goign to be there. SO I was pleasantly surprised when I learned that the reason the guy looked like Fuldu was that he actually was Fuldu. Yeah, I need to read some journals more closely. I was also surprised by 42itous who recognized me even though I couldn't quite place her. I always feel bad when I can't remember the names of cute girls.Anyway, eventually I reconnected with the non-useless members of my team who were stuck. Apparently, they'd found mistakes according to a grid and received the message "Ask us for this" but didn't know what to do next. "I've tried asking them for 'this'," bemoaned
saxikath, "but nothing worked." While they separated to canvass the canvases, I took the notebook and started filling in boxes. After heaneyland pointed out that I had some wrong boxes, I showed them the very pretty arrow I'd made. So our team asked for an arrow. Wrong again. So looked at the original painting and saw something in the corner the arrow was pointing to. Because I need glasses, I had to get up kind of close to confirm that it was, in fact, a thumbtack. When I returned, I was made to go ask for it, since everyone else had become tired of asking for the wrong thing.It is truly wonderful when one becomes useful at something in the Hunt that one should, by all rights, by useless at.
We Love You Chris Morse
ojouchan: The answer is "penises".ojouchan: You're going to make me spell it?We Are in Mystery Hunt
I was originally all on board with the idea of going to the Cocktail Party; I imagined that it would be Greg around a piano with other Setechies forcing people to do karaoke. (I'm still waiting for the Karaoke Mystery Hunt Puzzle, by the way.) But as the evening ground on to 2 a.m., I was less enthused. It'd been a long drive through various forms of precipitation to get to Boston that morning, and I was finally starting to feel it. My plan was to perform in Remembering Our Roots, then get some rest. But when our appointment for ROR was postponed till after the party, I relented when Artistry asked me to go with him.
See, the introduction led him to believe that the puzzle would involve noting which words were missing from songs, and he knew I was good at that. So I went off with him. I'm very glad I did. The Cocktail Party was much more fun than the Art Exhibit, and despite a restriction on the number of team members who could attend, the space was much bigger. I firmly believe that more people should have been allowed to see this show. The script is available, but a recording is not.
The show was fantastic. Artistry had been right to drag me along, I knew every song that was performed. And some of the songs were performed really well.
thedan's rendition of the Barenaked Ladies' "Alcohol" was particularly fantastic, and had me singing it to myself. This wasn't so good, actually. Thedan had actually sung, "Myst'ry Hunt, my permanent accessory," and "alcohol" was the answer. So I kept wanting to sing "Alcohol" but had to stop, since some people around me hadn't identified the song.Anyway, as I was writing down the answers, it was clear that the missing words were spelling out an acrostic "ROMANSI". Now, with that beginning, there's pretty much only one place you can go. And with the letter you use, there's also pretty much only one place you can go. So I was immensely pleased when my prediction came true and all of the players joined in with a rendition of "
I was the one who first called for an encore. In retrospect, I shouldn't have, since, you know, I had the answer and some others didn't, but I wanted to see it again. Give me a break, I was tired.
I was also standing next to
cnoocy during the show, who also got a kick out of Xanadu. In my glee, I started making rollerskating moves in the back of the crowd to crack him up during the encore.Normalville Remix
For Remembering Our Roots,
saxikath, ojouchan, and possibly tmcay wrote a wonderful pageant filled with normality, product placement, and a parody of West Side Story's "Somewhere." However, when we performed it, we were seconds over the time limit. That might not have mattered, except that cutting us off at the five minute mark meant that we didn't get our last sponsor in. The benevolent Town Councilmembers allowed us to try to speed things up to fulfill all of the requirements. However, by the time we got to our song the second time, the Normalville timekeeper indicated that we had four minutes left, exactly the same amount as before. OH NOES! We had to do something to make the song much, much faster, and that's hard to do with "Somewhere." So I came up with a way to indicate to everyone that we needed to be faster. The song went:All: There's a place for us.The tempo picked up a bit, and we finished just in time.
A normal place for us.
Of course, when we were done, we learned that the timekeeper was keeping the wrong time. When he said we had four minutes, we actually had three minutes. But it's better that he made that mistake, otherwise I wouldn't have gotten the chance to hiphoppily embarrass myself.
Wait a sec . . . .
I don't have a copy of the ACRONYM script. Hopefully someone does and can make it available.
Keeping Track
The cross-number of Express Yourself had been done, but nobody knew what else to do with the resulting twelve-digit number. I sat for a while doodling with ideas until
bookishfellow came along to doodle too. Eventually we came to a computer, and Bookishfellow suggested it might be a tracking number for Federal Express. I became as silent as a mouse—a mouse thinking, "I wish I'd thought of that." As I went to the page, Bookishfellow said, "It's probably not, I don't think they have numbers like that." I said nothing, but I continued to the tracking page. Sure enough, we found a package to a likely recipient.I thought this was a bit of a stretch, so I was surprised to learn from Chris that FedEx tracking numbers are now recognized by Google. I don't know when this information will be useful ever again, but I found it interesting.
We Love You
thedan, Part 1D3: The Felowship of the Duck
We Love You
thedan, Part 2At one point, I heard from somebody working on Post Modern that it was a blog puzzle. Made sense; knew there had to be one eventually; moved on. So I was surprised to see it on the Wall of Shame later on. Surely a small puzzle like that would be solved quickly? Well, it was once I got into it. First, Dennis and I spent a little time dithering around on websites. This led us, and probably many others, to
normalville. "I totally mock this 14-year-old," said Dennis, earning him a place on the Wall of Quotes. We spent some time trying to convince Dennis to AIM this person. I didn't think it would be very fruitful, but I knew it would be funny. Sadly, she was not online at the time. It was about then that I saw that the original word-search grid had only been half-heartedly solved. We quickly finished it off and found the answer in thedan's journal. By the time we got to it, the Great LJ Power Outage that undoubtedly gave Dan several small heart attacks was over. I called Setec headquarters, and had a conversation somethign like this:We Love You
thedan, Part 3At one point, Thedan answered the phone with a Normalville scat. Rawk.
El Google, Part 2
While
cramerica worked on King Philip, I was ostensibly working on something else. But I got the main Aha for the puzzle with another lucky Google search.Fifteen Minutes of Fame
My only appearance on the Acronym Wall of Quotes:
"We'd like to confirm the absence of a misprint."—Personally, I don't see what's so funny about it. I think it's a perfect way to tell HQ that you think they're wrong without actually saying so.
We Love You
ojouchanT3H CU73N355
Bridging the Gap
I ended up spearheading the final half of work on Parallel Universe. By the time I picked it up, it had been sitting on the Wall of Shame for a while. Someone earlier had picked up on a Bridge connection, but couldn't make anythign work. I'd avoided it since I knew nothing about Bridge, but as the Hunt wore on, I figured I'd look at it anyway. It was, in fact, a Bridge puzzle that involved many things about the scoring of Bridge. I learned much about Bridge while solving this puzzle. It was a great ordeal, and I'd be happy to go into great detail, but it would probably be very boring. But I'll skip to the end, when we had everything figured out and were pulling a final answer out round by round.
The final message was "ANSWER DECKHOUSE", but because of some minor mistakes we ended up with the phrase "AFSVER DECKHOURE". This was close enough to get the answer, but at the beginning, things weren't looking good. When TK and I had only the letters "AFSV" we both wanted to keep going because we were sure what we were doing was right in general. TK tried very hard to make these letters work though:
TK: A, F . . . Abercrombie and Fitch! Abercrombie and Fitch'S Very gay sweater!Unfortunately, it wasn't a Chris Morse puzzle.
Hopefully, soon, I'll have some time to right about the not-so-high points, as well as address more abstract issues of puzzle construction. Till then, some recommendations. Keep in mind that I haven't gotten a real good look at all of the puzzles yet.
- This Puzzle Sucks—Recommended for fans of the Buffangelverse. It's not too hard, and I challenge you to solve it without references like I did. (I didn't solve this during the Hunt, otherwise I would have used references to save time. But at home, watching Lost, it's a fun diversion.)
- Post Modern—Recommended for people who haven't read the spoiler for it already.
- Cocktail Party—Recommended for people who haven't read the spoiler for it already.
- Track 12—Recommended for music fans.
- An Ax to Grind—Recommended for rock guitar fans.
- Spare the Rod—Recommended for people who were once teenage girls or anyone else in love with cute boys.
- 1-1=2—Recommended for fans of flats or for people who want to know what the hell I'm blathering on about when I talk about flats.
- Six of One—Recommended for fans of cryptic crosswords.
- Black to Play—Recommended for Go players.
- Telephone Pictionary—Recommended for fans of [SPOILER].
- Standard Unassuming Logic Puzzles—Recommended for fans of nonstandard assuming logic puzzles.
- The pre-runaround puzzles.
- Scripts for various events (especially to the pre-runaround puzzles).
- More statistics.
- The recording of the Cocktail Party.
- A description of what was going on at the Department of Commerce Treasure Hunt.
no subject
(Anonymous) 2005-01-22 10:21 pm (UTC)(link)Hee hee hee!
Jo: "I'm such a GIIIIIIRRRRRRLLL!"
-Bennett.
no subject
1. That breakdown came out of NOWHERE. We did speed up though, as shown by my inability to stop my voice from switching
between Sop 2 and Alto.
2. Come on, who wants to spell penises?
3. I think Spare the Rod may have been my favorite puzzle.
no subject
Re #2. Apparently, not many. I was talking with Greg while we were doing the wrap-up and he said that many teams had the same reaction. I did point out that you had reason to balk, since he was obviously taking a more personal joy in tormenting you.
no subject
Re the Founding of Normalville pageant: saxikath and ojouchan wrote the song, and the three of us along with Qaqaq collborated on the script. "Sliced bread -- what's so great about that?" was one of my jokes. I thought it would bring down the house but it ended up falling flat.
no subject
Well, at least we thought it was funny.
Also, your "Coke and a smile" was awesome.
1-1=2, cocktail party
The restriction on number of people for cocktail party was to comply with MIT rules (we'd have needed special permission for more than 50 people). It is unfortunate that we didn't find the space earlier, so we would have had time to get the necessary permission.
A recording will be posted before too long.