Movies: 42 Up | Main | Movies: Silver City

January 21, 2005

Mystery Hunt Notes

The team solving stats have now been posted and we were 3rd on this as well as on the overall hunt. Looking at solutions for a few of the puzzles we missed found that Joe had been on the right track with Ginormous but had trouble doing the second factoring step so I think must have had an error in his number somehow. Still, pretty tricky puzzle with three levels of factoring and a different trick at each stage for pulling out the info you wanted and no midway for-sure confirmations you were on the right track. Last year had a bunch of (imho bad) puzzles like this but this year had almost none.

Little People, OTOH, had a very reasonable solution and I can't believe we didn't get it, particularly given the obviousness of the flowers in the first image and the all green guys box. We worked on this puzzle quite a lot and its amazing to me that nobody figured it out - it just doesn't seem that tricky. It may have made a big difference that for a bunch of the time, people were looking at B&W prints so the all-green guys box doesn't leap out as much, and in general the characters don't seem as distinctive. I think we need to make a point of printing more puzzles in color to at least have one easily available color copy. Certainly the 'find the location of this photo on campus' puzzles are really helped by having good color prints.

I am not at all surprised that very few teams solved Square Mess. I personally think having a non-dictionary word in the solution makes this an unfairly difficult puzzle and I'm glad I didn't try to code it as at least three people on our team did without success. The basic search space is 19! and you have to limit it and dictionary search is the only reasonable way to do so. The solution talks about getting the start of the message using dictionary search and then working from there but I think this is pretty unreasonable. There are just too many possible starts to pick out the right one (even with the correct guess I made very early that the message would start "find "). We also guessed the exact answer to the puzzle based on backsolving so really no great need to solve this one.

Posted by aarondf at January 21, 2005 12:28 PM

Comments

Post a comment