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January 16, 2007

Dr. Awkward wins MIT Mystery Hunt - Yeah!

(Edited a bit to fix a couple of typos and add some other notes on Wednesday.)

My team of the last 5 or so years (known generally as Palindromes and this year as Dr. Awkward) won the MIT Mystery Hunt for the first time since I joined and we'll be running it next year. I solved for 33 of the 38 hours the Hunt ran.

The hunt, run by the Midnight Bombers, was a generally absolutely excellent hunt with a ton of great puzzles. The round 8 Meta which our team (and many others) was stuck on for many hours was almost certainly in hindsight too hard but certainly not broken. I (and I am sure basically everyone else on all the teams) am incredibly glad it didn't come down to hinting, which no matter what way you do it will be problematic. Also, since this year there really was no endgame at all, whichever team got this first was almost guaranteed to win the hunt.

That actually brings me to my second objection to this year's otherwise excellent hunt - the extremely basic (and for me anti-climactic) endgame. I had never gotten to participate in an endgame before and was really looking forward to it and was pretty disappointed in what it was. I am using the term 'endgame' here and not 'runaround' very carefully as I have done many standard runarounds (and did the Good/Evil one this year) but what I was looking forward to were the cool set pieces at different locations (like defusing bomb last year) that don't really happen at any other time. Makes me even more sorry I was asleep a couple of years ago for the Normalville endgame which Palindromes got to do, even though not winning the hunt.

On the other hand, the small prizes for individual members of many of the teams (including certificates for our souls for all of Dr. Awkward), I thought was a really great addition and I hope this becomes a tradition for at least the winning team members. Google sponsored the hunt this year for the first time and this money was in part what allowed this - I hope they are willing to do so again.

Some of the particular puzzles I worked on solving and really enjoyed were the very difficult Squad Car which only two teams solved, the great minesweeper variant, the Wrath Sin meta sudoku variant, and the Mass Manipulation Meta which was based on Illuminati (which I have played since the original Pocket Box version in 1983) - pretty easy puzzle but up my alley and I had it solved (with a final assist by Mike who knew the name of the current MIT president) within 30 minutes or so of seeing the video based on around 4-5 of 9 answers - somehow I had missed seeing the video when we first got it - Toonhead also made a great card for us to turn in. I think I was also the first person on our team to realize how the Sin puzzles worked, guessing that our packet (which was out being photocopied at the time) contained 7 puzzles and each would match up with one of the Sin puzzles and then combine for the Evil answer which turned out to be the Super-Meta this year.

I also did really enjoy the Super-Meta. Wasn't that difficult really, especially with it being projected so everyone could work on the word connections and such, but really elegant and cool. Was fun to see Titan listed as one of the games too. Various teammates were asking if Titan was really a game and I could pretty confidently answer them ;) Still, certainly true that not nearly as well known as the other four.

Oh, I also must admit to my moment of complete obliviousness on War Dances. I was the first person on our team to see this and ended up watching the whole video like 3 times as people came over and wanted me to start it from the beginning again. Despite this, I had no clue at all that it was a World of Warcraft puzzle (and this despite knowing that Jenn, the dancer, was a big WoW fan). I barely pay attention to the dancing in WoW but still, I have played the game for a TON of time and watched people dancing while waiting around in Raids or whatever. I think my trouble was that I immediately realized it was a music/dance puzzle and just turned off the puzzle solving part of my brain to take a break (was also like 3 AM or something at the time). Anyway, definitely feel a fool for completely missing this.

On a more personal level, as always one of the things I like so much about this hunt and the big team sizes is the cosolving aspect of it. There was only one puzzle I really solved alone and it was the most trivial one of the hunt, the basic 10 differences puzzle but I worked with tons of different people on lots of different puzzles. I particularly enjoyed all the co-solving I did with Mike Korn, who is a great solver and also incredibly knowledgeable about MIT. We made a really good team on a bunch of different puzzles, including 3 of the 4 above, the Good/Evil runaround and others. Its too bad we never figured out the Round 8 Meta, which Mike in particular worked on a ton long before it became the sticking point for the entire team.

I was also really glad that a second of my BU colleagues came this year and ended up solving for like 18 hours or so total and really enjoying it and making significant contributions. Our team in total had around 7 people that either I had invited or those I had invited in the past had invited.

I hope we can live up to the standard set by the Bombers next year and am certainly looking forward to trying.

Posted by aarondf at January 16, 2007 02:53 PM

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