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January 18, 2005
MIT Mystery Hunt 2005
Thanks to Setec Astronomy who did a great job with this year's hunt, puzzles with linked solutions available here. The puzzles were almost uniformly clean and excellent, sometimes even a bit too excellent where the answer was so linked to the puzzle that it was guessable without solving the puzzle. Our team ended up third but easily could have won if we could have solved the final two super-metas more quickly, although I guess Acronym was stuck for even longer and lost their sizable lead and the hunt for it. The Purple meta wasn't even that tricky and I think only sleep deprivation explains why it took us so long. The Orange meta was a bit of different story, but we still should have solved it. View Source should be a standard thing to do when stuck and would have worked in all browsers. Interestingly, without that, Firefox on the PC worked well, Mozilla on the PC not at all (which was what I was using during the hunt unfortunately) and Mozilla on Linux worked a bit.
There was basically zero hinting till the very end (when it didn't matter for determining the winner) which is great, as it means the puzzles are solvable without it, and hinting really messes up hunts in a big way for all sorts of reasons.
There were so many good puzzles that I don't think I'm going to try to single out a few this time although if someone wants recommendations for particular knowledge/skill sets I would try to give them. Two more gaming friends came this year and made contributions, although each of them could only make it for part of the hunt.
My only real regrets are missing the endgame as I didn't sleep till too late, as I misjudged how long the hunt would go, and missing the wrap-up meeting as it was in the morning and not posted to the website, which must have been an oversight.
Posted by aarondf at January 18, 2005 12:07 PM
Comments
Actually, Acronym was behind both Random and El Google in terms of when the orange metameta became the last puzzle we had left to solve. So while it's true that we could have won the hunt if we had figured it out sooner (as could El Google, etc.), we actually made up time at the end of the Hunt by solving the orange metameta sans hint -- Setec was giving hints on it based on the time teams reached the point that it was the only metapuzzle they had left. We jumped the line, solving it between the time Random got its hint and you got yours -- but couldn't make up the intervening time fast enough.
Posted by: Francis at January 23, 2005 11:08 AM
Francis,
Thanks. Since as I said, I missed the end and wrap-up, most of what I knew about team standings was from rumors. Thanks for the clarification.
Posted by: Aaron at January 25, 2005 11:17 AM
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