MIT Mystery Hunt 2023
Jan. 25th, 2023 10:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fauxkloreIt’s taken me a long time to write this because a) I was waiting for the puzzles to be publicly available and b) I couldn’t quite figure out what angle I wanted to take. Let’s see if this works. The TL:DR version is that I had a good time because our team worked well together, but I thought this year’s hunt was deeply flawed.
MLK Day weekend was the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. I hunted with Halibut That Bass again. Our team was virtual, mostly because our leadership didn’t want to incur the risks of being on campus. In some ways, I’d have preferred being in person, but this was just as well seeing as how I’d been up in Massachusetts the previous weekend. Being virtual probably did affect people’s decisions to hunt with us, since our team was down to only 25 people.
This year’s hunt was written by Team Mate. The nominal theme was “Museum of Interesting Things” and the intro told us about a gimmick in which an AI (named “Mate”) had produced all the puzzles. The way things work is that you start out with one area and solving puzzles opens up other areas.
And that is where the problem started. Namely, there weren’t very many puzzles in the early rounds. So we sat around for a while, stuck on a handful of puzzles, without opening up more puzzles for us to work on. In general, we also thought that the puzzles in the early rounds were harder than normal. So we were fairly frustrated pretty much throughout the entire hunt. This significantly impacted our ability to see much of the story. When we did get more puzzles, we got a lot at a time and were spread too thin to work on all of them. In the end, we solved 42 puzzles (and bought answers to another 35 or so using free answer tokens we got partly from events and partly from just the passage of time. For example, towards the end, they were giving out a few free answers per hour). Anyway, our solves placed us 44th out of the 229 teams who had solved any puzzles. (There were 301 teams registered.) There were 152 puzzles total, by the way, so I think we never saw roughly half of them at all.
Before I get into some details, I want to say a couple of things about why I do events like this and what they have to say about people’s skills. People usually think of solving puzzles as a solitary activity, but the sort of puzzles at events like this usually require several people cooperating. As a general rule, I like thinking out loud and bouncing ideas off of people, so this fits my style well. (I have learned to be okay with suggesting absurd ideas which turn out to have nothing to do with what we’re trying to solve.) And the thing about the Mystery Hunt, in particular, is that it’s one of the few places where one sees particularly clever and complex puzzles that require non-linear thinking.
The other thing I want to say is that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. There are some subjects on which I my knowledge base is pretty much empty. For example, we had one puzzle that we figured out had to do with a television series that I never got into. There’s info on wikipedia, but it makes more sense for people who are familiar with the show to work on that. Similarly, I know next to nothing about video games or rap music or, frankly, most pop culture. I also don’t have a great visual memory, so I am unlikely to be able to identify a lot of photos of people.
But I also don’t think that not knowing some bit of trivia says anything about a person’s intelligence. It used to drive me nuts that my mother would say she was dumb because of some odd tidbit she didn’t know. All of this is to say that I don’t think less of my intelligence because of my pop culture illiteracy.
Anyway, here are some details. The puzzles are publicly accessible now at interestingthings.museum if you want to look at them yourself. (Solutions are also there for each puzzle.) I will comment on only a few and will try not to be too spoilerish. Which round they belong to is in parentheses.
People Watching (Atrium) was a puzzle we did get a good bit of relatively easily. However, we got stumped on the final part of it. We realized there was some information we had to do something with, but we got stuck on it. It was decidedly tricky, though we did eventually get the answer.
One puzzle we did particularly well on was H2NO, which I think we solved in about 15 minutes. I was disappointed that another item that fit the category wasn’t included.
Brain Freeze (Science) was pretty fun and one I was able to actually be fairly helpful on.
I didn’t work on it, but my impression was that Bridge Building (Science) was especially frustrating. There were a few people who consulted other people they knew with expertise in chemistry and even after that and getting a hint, we were stuck. Apparently we were able to get the answer after getting a second hint.
Direct Translation (Natural History) looked at first glance like it would be up my alley, since it appeared to involve a non-English alphabet. (I can read the Cyrillic and Hebrew alphabets easily and muddle my way through Greek. I am thinking about learning to read Hangul, so I can read signs in Korean in my neighborhood.) Unfortunately, it didn’t involve an alphabet from a natural language. Someone was able to recognize it, and I dropped out of trying to solve it at that point, because I just wasn’t up to attempting to make sense of it. Some of the members of our team did make progress, but, in the end, we bought the answer.
I’m going to mention Cute Cats (Art Gallery) only because, while I didn’t work much on it, I knew a critical bit of trivia which got us to the solution. If I’d been working on it earlier, I might have gotten us to the solution about 15 minutes sooner. I had a similar minor contribution to Interpretive Art (Art Gallery), and I was also able to use that information in the associated metapuzzle, Artistic Vision, which was fun to work on (but wouldn’t be doable without the answers to all of the puzzles in the Art Gallery round).
The puzzle that caused us the most frustration was Some Assembly Required (The Factory Floor). I admit to having created a bit of a rabbit hole, because I thought some of the pictures we had to assemble looked like Escher’s art. and I spent over an hour looking through galleries from the Escher Museum. Other people on the team put some things together that they thought looked like a firehouse. Which also led me to an entirely unrelated bit of trivia. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention that the Kendall Hotel near the MIT campus used to be a firehouse.) Let’s just say, we never got anywhere and ended up buying the answer.
There were a few puzzles which required in-person activities. Fortunately, we did have one team member who was able to go to campus to look at one of those - and, also, to participate in some events. But it was still annoying that they hadn’t really thought through the hybrid aspects of this year’s hunt.
The one exception to that was Think Fast (Basement) which was an interactive activity that could be done virtually. We were surprisingly good at this and, were, apparently the only team which took one of the two possible paths to finishing it. You had to choose 5 of the 6 rounds to play and everybody else choose Round 4 as one of them, while we chose round 6. One of the keys to this is that we had very good teamwork.
There are a couple of things which we usually see (and I am useful for), but didn’t. It turned out that there actually was a scavenger hunt, but it was in a late round, so we never even got to see it. That is annoying because it’s the sort of thing that allows a lot of people, some of whom may be less experienced solvers, to participate. The other thing I never saw this year was a puzzle that involves knitting or crocheting something. If there was one, I still haven’t found it.
A few puzzles I would recommend as being fun and reasonably tractable are You’re Telling Me (Atrium), Scicabulary (Science), and at least some parts of Fine Dining (Art Gallery) but pulling it all together might be too hard. I heard that Graffiti (Art Gallery) was also fun, but haven’t spent time on it. And, of course, I haven’t looked at a lot of other puzzles.
Hopefully, things will work out better next year.
MLK Day weekend was the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. I hunted with Halibut That Bass again. Our team was virtual, mostly because our leadership didn’t want to incur the risks of being on campus. In some ways, I’d have preferred being in person, but this was just as well seeing as how I’d been up in Massachusetts the previous weekend. Being virtual probably did affect people’s decisions to hunt with us, since our team was down to only 25 people.
This year’s hunt was written by Team Mate. The nominal theme was “Museum of Interesting Things” and the intro told us about a gimmick in which an AI (named “Mate”) had produced all the puzzles. The way things work is that you start out with one area and solving puzzles opens up other areas.
And that is where the problem started. Namely, there weren’t very many puzzles in the early rounds. So we sat around for a while, stuck on a handful of puzzles, without opening up more puzzles for us to work on. In general, we also thought that the puzzles in the early rounds were harder than normal. So we were fairly frustrated pretty much throughout the entire hunt. This significantly impacted our ability to see much of the story. When we did get more puzzles, we got a lot at a time and were spread too thin to work on all of them. In the end, we solved 42 puzzles (and bought answers to another 35 or so using free answer tokens we got partly from events and partly from just the passage of time. For example, towards the end, they were giving out a few free answers per hour). Anyway, our solves placed us 44th out of the 229 teams who had solved any puzzles. (There were 301 teams registered.) There were 152 puzzles total, by the way, so I think we never saw roughly half of them at all.
Before I get into some details, I want to say a couple of things about why I do events like this and what they have to say about people’s skills. People usually think of solving puzzles as a solitary activity, but the sort of puzzles at events like this usually require several people cooperating. As a general rule, I like thinking out loud and bouncing ideas off of people, so this fits my style well. (I have learned to be okay with suggesting absurd ideas which turn out to have nothing to do with what we’re trying to solve.) And the thing about the Mystery Hunt, in particular, is that it’s one of the few places where one sees particularly clever and complex puzzles that require non-linear thinking.
The other thing I want to say is that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing. There are some subjects on which I my knowledge base is pretty much empty. For example, we had one puzzle that we figured out had to do with a television series that I never got into. There’s info on wikipedia, but it makes more sense for people who are familiar with the show to work on that. Similarly, I know next to nothing about video games or rap music or, frankly, most pop culture. I also don’t have a great visual memory, so I am unlikely to be able to identify a lot of photos of people.
But I also don’t think that not knowing some bit of trivia says anything about a person’s intelligence. It used to drive me nuts that my mother would say she was dumb because of some odd tidbit she didn’t know. All of this is to say that I don’t think less of my intelligence because of my pop culture illiteracy.
Anyway, here are some details. The puzzles are publicly accessible now at interestingthings.museum if you want to look at them yourself. (Solutions are also there for each puzzle.) I will comment on only a few and will try not to be too spoilerish. Which round they belong to is in parentheses.
People Watching (Atrium) was a puzzle we did get a good bit of relatively easily. However, we got stumped on the final part of it. We realized there was some information we had to do something with, but we got stuck on it. It was decidedly tricky, though we did eventually get the answer.
One puzzle we did particularly well on was H2NO, which I think we solved in about 15 minutes. I was disappointed that another item that fit the category wasn’t included.
Brain Freeze (Science) was pretty fun and one I was able to actually be fairly helpful on.
I didn’t work on it, but my impression was that Bridge Building (Science) was especially frustrating. There were a few people who consulted other people they knew with expertise in chemistry and even after that and getting a hint, we were stuck. Apparently we were able to get the answer after getting a second hint.
Direct Translation (Natural History) looked at first glance like it would be up my alley, since it appeared to involve a non-English alphabet. (I can read the Cyrillic and Hebrew alphabets easily and muddle my way through Greek. I am thinking about learning to read Hangul, so I can read signs in Korean in my neighborhood.) Unfortunately, it didn’t involve an alphabet from a natural language. Someone was able to recognize it, and I dropped out of trying to solve it at that point, because I just wasn’t up to attempting to make sense of it. Some of the members of our team did make progress, but, in the end, we bought the answer.
I’m going to mention Cute Cats (Art Gallery) only because, while I didn’t work much on it, I knew a critical bit of trivia which got us to the solution. If I’d been working on it earlier, I might have gotten us to the solution about 15 minutes sooner. I had a similar minor contribution to Interpretive Art (Art Gallery), and I was also able to use that information in the associated metapuzzle, Artistic Vision, which was fun to work on (but wouldn’t be doable without the answers to all of the puzzles in the Art Gallery round).
The puzzle that caused us the most frustration was Some Assembly Required (The Factory Floor). I admit to having created a bit of a rabbit hole, because I thought some of the pictures we had to assemble looked like Escher’s art. and I spent over an hour looking through galleries from the Escher Museum. Other people on the team put some things together that they thought looked like a firehouse. Which also led me to an entirely unrelated bit of trivia. (I don’t think it’s a spoiler to mention that the Kendall Hotel near the MIT campus used to be a firehouse.) Let’s just say, we never got anywhere and ended up buying the answer.
There were a few puzzles which required in-person activities. Fortunately, we did have one team member who was able to go to campus to look at one of those - and, also, to participate in some events. But it was still annoying that they hadn’t really thought through the hybrid aspects of this year’s hunt.
The one exception to that was Think Fast (Basement) which was an interactive activity that could be done virtually. We were surprisingly good at this and, were, apparently the only team which took one of the two possible paths to finishing it. You had to choose 5 of the 6 rounds to play and everybody else choose Round 4 as one of them, while we chose round 6. One of the keys to this is that we had very good teamwork.
There are a couple of things which we usually see (and I am useful for), but didn’t. It turned out that there actually was a scavenger hunt, but it was in a late round, so we never even got to see it. That is annoying because it’s the sort of thing that allows a lot of people, some of whom may be less experienced solvers, to participate. The other thing I never saw this year was a puzzle that involves knitting or crocheting something. If there was one, I still haven’t found it.
A few puzzles I would recommend as being fun and reasonably tractable are You’re Telling Me (Atrium), Scicabulary (Science), and at least some parts of Fine Dining (Art Gallery) but pulling it all together might be too hard. I heard that Graffiti (Art Gallery) was also fun, but haven’t spent time on it. And, of course, I haven’t looked at a lot of other puzzles.
Hopefully, things will work out better next year.
