MIT Mystery Hunt 2015, part 4
So here we are, about 30 total puzzles and 4 metas and a meta-meta to go, before 11 AM on Saturday. Today's excerpt is in the order we solved the puzzles.
When we first opened Steve's Parable, we ignored it (even with the notice that we could get access to it from HQ) because we figured one of our students or their friends would have it and be more familiar with it. But when that was slow to materialize, we did take them up on the offer, but couldn't solve it. Eventually (when he thought it was OK to wake people up on the West Coast) one of our teammates asked his 12-year-old son to try it. At 1:06 PM we got the answer - not in the intended way. The 12YO found the various intended paths but couldn't extract an answer from them. And the game was coded so that if you broke into the lock without the combination, it would not contain the answer. So he did the next best thing - he broke into the redstone logic, and determined the combination from the lock itself, then loaded a clean copy of the game and entered the combination to get the answer.
The puzzle I was spending most of my time on since the Ocean meta-meta interaction was Read Between the Lines. When all you get is an image, you start trying the usual tricks. I discovered part one of the key immediately by turning off the transparency, and Mapmaker got part 4 by looking at the binary, where the text segment appears plainly. I thought about simple steganographic methods and looked at the low bit of each color channel to find the red bits encoding part 3, and I felt sure there was something in the histogram for part 4, but it took a little while for me to discover just what it was.
I didn't work on Benny Lava at all, but my teammates did and when we heard the answer was ANAL BLEEDING, even knowing we had a bunch of bodily disasters in this round, we were seriously squicked out. It took me only seconds to guess that we needed to put a blood type after the words in the Spotted Tower meta, for all that it didn't help us solve it. When HQ visited later, I told them that RECTION was still the worst Mystery Hunt answer ever, but ANAL BLEEDING was now the most disgusting one.
The other puzzle that I spent much time working on was Foamy. Once I gave a proper sum of the across and down clues in the main puzzle, we made the right deduction about how to combine the two grids and solve it. It is just horribly, horribly error-prone. A couple different solvers charged ahead with an error-filled approximate solution and determined from doing so that it was a picture of Ariel, the Little Mermaid. Once we reached the point where we only had this puzzle, its meta and meta-meta, and Mythological Connections open, we burned some of our oracle questions on Foamy which helped us guess that the red dots were going to form Braille letters, which assisted the eventual solving effort. When we first got the message 3 DAY PROBLEM 4 ESSES, there were some doubts this was correct, but when I explained that the answer should have 4 S's in it, people understood the message. Somebody guessed SEA SICKNESS, but remembering the little mermaid's problem (which caused us to guess LARYNGITIS and other answers earlier) I came up with VOICELESSNESS, the correct answer. At 7:23 PM we finally solved it.
Sometime while I was working on the meta and meta-meta, somebody got Mythological Connections, so we had all the regular puzzle answers.
On the Spotted Tower meta, we had all the transformations quickly, but got sidetracked by applying the transformations to too many words and not applying them backward. About 11 PM we got on the right track with the 5 reversed transformations to make diseases, but...
On the Atlantis Meta-Meta, we got on the wrong track by making the wonderful association of the colors of the shells which we received upon opening the rounds, which also appear in the art on each tower, and the colors of the paths in the meta-meta. The one for the Spiky Tower was bright white, the one for the Golden Tower was pearly off-white (golden on the world map, but still similar), the one for the Colorful Tower was orange-red (variously red, yellow, and orange in the world map), and the one for the Spotted Tower was, aside from its spotted portion, a very dark chocolate brown. These were very close to the white, slightly greenish yellow, orange-red, and black lines on the meta map, and we supposed that there might be some variation in color of the shells.
Of course, this was wrong! Somebody had tried all 24 configurations of the three answers we had, but he missed the one word spelled out vertically within the portion of the grid we had answers for when doing so. It finally took Projectyl, solving remotely, to point out that these four rounds corresponded to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And each of them rides a particular color horse, traditionally - the colors of the meta-meta grid, but NOT in the way we'd been matching them. This led to a correct fill of these three answers in the grid, and the discovery of PLENTY spelled out among the part we had. Looking for antidotes to the other horsemen got us nearly complete HEALTH and LIFE, and with PANACEA already guessed as part of the solution to the Spotted Tower's problems, we got PEACE. This led to near simultaneous backsolving of E?CHA???? PANACEA for the spotted tower and the solution to the meta-meta from the corresponding squares of the other grid.
And we submitted the answer 14 seconds ahead of Left Out. We had mistakenly believed Left Out was already on the runaround, somebody having read on social media that they solved this meta-meta 15 minutes earlier, but they had actually found the unintentional red herring I NEED A COIN spelled out across one row of the meta-meta grid with the words in reverse order, if you swap the positions of just two answers.
Some people went to the TOP OF THE TALLEST TOWER (the Green building, naturally) at the same time people from Left Out went there, but separately by performing our feats in different stairwells, as I understand it. (And we apparently finished faster.) The rest of us got ready in our HQ, printing out the complete answer list from the List of Puzzles page (thanks, Random, for this!), gathering the magnetowhatsit from the first meta-meta, the sword(fish) from the second, the physical shells which were now unused, and we brought along the whole treasure chest for good measure.
The Runaround
A little after midnight we got the call to go to the first floor of 13 (the "dance floor" area) for the runaround (our log says we accomplished the Atlantis interaction at 12:22 AM, but this is a bit late; we were already almost to 13 by 12:14 when I texted a friend that we were starting the runaround), but that was just a gathering place, and a place for a brief interaction with our Atlantean guide. She took us to one of those absurdly steep lecture rooms in 35 for the meeting with the Kraken, who insulted us, called us landlubbers (what, a group of intrepid underwater explorers, landlubbers?), and asked us to prove ourselves worthy. One Random assistant tried to stealthily erase CTHULHU'S LAIR from one of the blackboards, revealing what this room had been used for earlier in the Hunt, and then wrote up the five skills we needed to prove.
Knowledge: Family Feud
The Teamwork event took place in the room we were already gathered in. This game was similar to Family Feud, except (1) all the categories were about fish or things you do in the water, (2) there was only one team, and unlimited strikes, and (3) the first time we got seriously stuck trying to fill out the board, we were informed we could pass to get a fresh board. We had to play until we got 75 right answers (no survey scores, just any answers on the board). When we did so, we were led to another room.
Friendship: Selfies with Fish Stickers
Somewhere in building 37, we were brought into a room and the selfie game was explained to us. They had a webapp that let us upload selfies, and log in with our same credentials from the main 20000puzzles site. We needed to use it to upload selfies of one of our faces along with one of the fish stickers which were hidden throughout the building on floors 0, 4, and 5, and we needed to find 200 different stickers, each of which was named for tracking purposes. (We got the impression that this might scaled for team size, and teams bigger than our 40-ish size might have had to scour the whole building for more fish - can anyone confirm?)
Anyway, we did this, and moved on.
Teamwork: Human Pictionary
This was like The Campus Canvas from 2010 except since it was during the runaround, so we were racing, and they made us swap in new guessers after each word. It took place in Lobby 7.
Communication: Giant Word Search
I forget where this was, but a crab in this room told us to look out for traps in the 3.5 foot by 14 foot word search puzzle that was laid out on the floor. If you saw the big puzzle from the big-and-little-Alice grids last year, it was like that except longer. Well, and unlike those grids, this one was actually a word search. We had to communicate to be sure we knew what words people were finding, since the grid was so big no one person could look at the whole thing. We eventually figured out all our non-meta answers 6 letters or longer were hidden, except one, which a message spelled out in semaphore by the pairs of overlapping answers told us to look for. Good thing we came into this puzzle with all the answers. :-) This took us a little over an hour to complete, the longest of the events, and from what I hear, we did good to finish it in that time, though in fact most of the lead teams came in with most of the answers and backsolved some of their missing ones from this event. The actual answer here was REPRISE, the first answer we backsolved at the start of the hunt; this choice made sure that nearly all teams would have this answer.
I actually sat out this one because I was too tired to be effective at searching for words, and even at our team size not everybody could fit around the puzzle. When we left this event, our guide ran to the next event, and we had to try hard to keep up. I think this is because our time here secured us a solid lead.
Update: I've added a photo of Luck's solved copy of this word search. Spoilers, if you look closely enough, of course. The room I have it in is barely long enough to contain the entire puzzle.
Perception: Identifying Puzzles
The Anglerfish's room at the bottom of the ocean in building 66 was very dark so that they could project images of parts of puzzles and "images we would have seen while solving puzzles." We had 40 bubbles to eliminate. Each correct puzzle title eliminated a bubble. Each wrong title added a bubble, and the picture was still there to continue guessing. We could pass one we were stuck on, at a cost of having 3 bubbles added. I think we passed 2 or 3 times and got one or two wrong, but made it through fairly quickly, all things considered.
At one point the Goosebumps books from the ERMAHGERD girl's picture came up, and everybody started yelling ERMAHGERD and laughing all over again for about 30 seconds before we got serious and gave the name of the puzzle (Graveyard meta).
The Coin
We came back from 66 through the basement, I initially thought to avoid running into another team taking the course we just came in through, but we were led into the basement door to 26-100 that opens onto the stage area in front. Before we entered, we were warned that the room contains an extremely powerful magnet which we should be sure not to stand immediately next to if we have a pacemaker, and don't put our phones or computers directly on it, and don't touch it with any metal we want to separate from it later. (A neodymium magnet.)
When we entered, at the top of the room we saw the top two rows filled aisle to aisle with members of Random. The Kraken was there, and told us we needed to identify the lodestone in a single guess, without touching it. People started searching their pockets and belongings for appropriate metal objects, and somebody came up with the collection of chains and locks removed from the treasure chest, which almost certainly would have worked. Our Atlantean guide, however, who had taken our magnetowhatsit for "safe keeping" back in building 13, stepped forward and said she had upgraded the device, and handed Dalryaug, who had stepped forward as team leader to do the final task, a real metal detector. She briefly showed him how it worked, and he went up to the collection of rocks and got a very clearly audible beep from the penultimate one. So we guessed that one, and won at 5:02 AM Sunday.
The "rocks" we tested were actually painted styrofoam, I think, one of them with the neodymium magnet inside it, but they needed to keep that for other teams to complete the runaround. They gave us a big (grapefruit-sized) chunk of real lodestone (magnetite) instead, which some people marveled at the weight of (the iron in it, I guess). We also got the neodymium magnet at the wrapup, and the commemorative coins. I joked about taking it to the glass-walled materials science lab down the hall from our HQ in building 4 and having those guys cut it into chunks for everybody, but we left it whole. (This is the lab with the visible band saw, anvil, and other crazy tools.)
After we celebrated for about half an hour, they asked us to leave so that another team could finish their runaround.
Statistics
This DEEP chart (from Dr. Nautilus's tumblr) is the only set of solving stats we have so far, and since DEEP mostly came from solves (though metas and some rounds were worth more than other puzzles), since we all got the puzzles in the same order, this is a pretty good indicator of progress. It seems we and Palindrome were neck and neck through the early going, and Codex was also close, but about 9 hours in, right after we got our treasure chest, we pulled away from the pack and held the lead until the last hours before our final meta solve. It looks like at 13 hours we were briefly ahead by about 50 DEEP, which is roughly an entire round, and about 17 hours in, once we got into Atlantis and the solving pace slowed down, we were briefly about 4 hours ahead of the next team to reach the same point. This makes sense given how long we were stuck on the final meta-meta.
The burst right after we reached Atlantis at about 16.5 hours in appears to be from the point we finished the school of fish meta and backsolved most of the remaining fish. From 5:29 to 6:09 AM Saturday, we solved the school of fish meta (worth 10 DEEP), Captain Planet (no DEEP), and 10 regular puzzles, one of them from a workshop round and worth 3.9 DEEP, one from Atlantis and worth 4.8 DEEP, and the rest from school of fish and worth 2.0 DEEP each, for a total of 34.7 DEEP in 40 minutes. Interestingly, meta-metas and the Aquatic Acquaintances puzzles, which unlocked interactions, did not award DEEP (or at least our team log does not show any).
When we first opened Steve's Parable, we ignored it (even with the notice that we could get access to it from HQ) because we figured one of our students or their friends would have it and be more familiar with it. But when that was slow to materialize, we did take them up on the offer, but couldn't solve it. Eventually (when he thought it was OK to wake people up on the West Coast) one of our teammates asked his 12-year-old son to try it. At 1:06 PM we got the answer - not in the intended way. The 12YO found the various intended paths but couldn't extract an answer from them. And the game was coded so that if you broke into the lock without the combination, it would not contain the answer. So he did the next best thing - he broke into the redstone logic, and determined the combination from the lock itself, then loaded a clean copy of the game and entered the combination to get the answer.
The puzzle I was spending most of my time on since the Ocean meta-meta interaction was Read Between the Lines. When all you get is an image, you start trying the usual tricks. I discovered part one of the key immediately by turning off the transparency, and Mapmaker got part 4 by looking at the binary, where the text segment appears plainly. I thought about simple steganographic methods and looked at the low bit of each color channel to find the red bits encoding part 3, and I felt sure there was something in the histogram for part 4, but it took a little while for me to discover just what it was.
I didn't work on Benny Lava at all, but my teammates did and when we heard the answer was ANAL BLEEDING, even knowing we had a bunch of bodily disasters in this round, we were seriously squicked out. It took me only seconds to guess that we needed to put a blood type after the words in the Spotted Tower meta, for all that it didn't help us solve it. When HQ visited later, I told them that RECTION was still the worst Mystery Hunt answer ever, but ANAL BLEEDING was now the most disgusting one.
The other puzzle that I spent much time working on was Foamy. Once I gave a proper sum of the across and down clues in the main puzzle, we made the right deduction about how to combine the two grids and solve it. It is just horribly, horribly error-prone. A couple different solvers charged ahead with an error-filled approximate solution and determined from doing so that it was a picture of Ariel, the Little Mermaid. Once we reached the point where we only had this puzzle, its meta and meta-meta, and Mythological Connections open, we burned some of our oracle questions on Foamy which helped us guess that the red dots were going to form Braille letters, which assisted the eventual solving effort. When we first got the message 3 DAY PROBLEM 4 ESSES, there were some doubts this was correct, but when I explained that the answer should have 4 S's in it, people understood the message. Somebody guessed SEA SICKNESS, but remembering the little mermaid's problem (which caused us to guess LARYNGITIS and other answers earlier) I came up with VOICELESSNESS, the correct answer. At 7:23 PM we finally solved it.
Sometime while I was working on the meta and meta-meta, somebody got Mythological Connections, so we had all the regular puzzle answers.
On the Spotted Tower meta, we had all the transformations quickly, but got sidetracked by applying the transformations to too many words and not applying them backward. About 11 PM we got on the right track with the 5 reversed transformations to make diseases, but...
On the Atlantis Meta-Meta, we got on the wrong track by making the wonderful association of the colors of the shells which we received upon opening the rounds, which also appear in the art on each tower, and the colors of the paths in the meta-meta. The one for the Spiky Tower was bright white, the one for the Golden Tower was pearly off-white (golden on the world map, but still similar), the one for the Colorful Tower was orange-red (variously red, yellow, and orange in the world map), and the one for the Spotted Tower was, aside from its spotted portion, a very dark chocolate brown. These were very close to the white, slightly greenish yellow, orange-red, and black lines on the meta map, and we supposed that there might be some variation in color of the shells.
Of course, this was wrong! Somebody had tried all 24 configurations of the three answers we had, but he missed the one word spelled out vertically within the portion of the grid we had answers for when doing so. It finally took Projectyl, solving remotely, to point out that these four rounds corresponded to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. And each of them rides a particular color horse, traditionally - the colors of the meta-meta grid, but NOT in the way we'd been matching them. This led to a correct fill of these three answers in the grid, and the discovery of PLENTY spelled out among the part we had. Looking for antidotes to the other horsemen got us nearly complete HEALTH and LIFE, and with PANACEA already guessed as part of the solution to the Spotted Tower's problems, we got PEACE. This led to near simultaneous backsolving of E?CHA???? PANACEA for the spotted tower and the solution to the meta-meta from the corresponding squares of the other grid.
And we submitted the answer 14 seconds ahead of Left Out. We had mistakenly believed Left Out was already on the runaround, somebody having read on social media that they solved this meta-meta 15 minutes earlier, but they had actually found the unintentional red herring I NEED A COIN spelled out across one row of the meta-meta grid with the words in reverse order, if you swap the positions of just two answers.
Some people went to the TOP OF THE TALLEST TOWER (the Green building, naturally) at the same time people from Left Out went there, but separately by performing our feats in different stairwells, as I understand it. (And we apparently finished faster.) The rest of us got ready in our HQ, printing out the complete answer list from the List of Puzzles page (thanks, Random, for this!), gathering the magnetowhatsit from the first meta-meta, the sword(fish) from the second, the physical shells which were now unused, and we brought along the whole treasure chest for good measure.
The Runaround
A little after midnight we got the call to go to the first floor of 13 (the "dance floor" area) for the runaround (our log says we accomplished the Atlantis interaction at 12:22 AM, but this is a bit late; we were already almost to 13 by 12:14 when I texted a friend that we were starting the runaround), but that was just a gathering place, and a place for a brief interaction with our Atlantean guide. She took us to one of those absurdly steep lecture rooms in 35 for the meeting with the Kraken, who insulted us, called us landlubbers (what, a group of intrepid underwater explorers, landlubbers?), and asked us to prove ourselves worthy. One Random assistant tried to stealthily erase CTHULHU'S LAIR from one of the blackboards, revealing what this room had been used for earlier in the Hunt, and then wrote up the five skills we needed to prove.
Knowledge: Family Feud
The Teamwork event took place in the room we were already gathered in. This game was similar to Family Feud, except (1) all the categories were about fish or things you do in the water, (2) there was only one team, and unlimited strikes, and (3) the first time we got seriously stuck trying to fill out the board, we were informed we could pass to get a fresh board. We had to play until we got 75 right answers (no survey scores, just any answers on the board). When we did so, we were led to another room.
Friendship: Selfies with Fish Stickers
Somewhere in building 37, we were brought into a room and the selfie game was explained to us. They had a webapp that let us upload selfies, and log in with our same credentials from the main 20000puzzles site. We needed to use it to upload selfies of one of our faces along with one of the fish stickers which were hidden throughout the building on floors 0, 4, and 5, and we needed to find 200 different stickers, each of which was named for tracking purposes. (We got the impression that this might scaled for team size, and teams bigger than our 40-ish size might have had to scour the whole building for more fish - can anyone confirm?)
Anyway, we did this, and moved on.
Teamwork: Human Pictionary
This was like The Campus Canvas from 2010 except since it was during the runaround, so we were racing, and they made us swap in new guessers after each word. It took place in Lobby 7.
Communication: Giant Word Search
I forget where this was, but a crab in this room told us to look out for traps in the 3.5 foot by 14 foot word search puzzle that was laid out on the floor. If you saw the big puzzle from the big-and-little-Alice grids last year, it was like that except longer. Well, and unlike those grids, this one was actually a word search. We had to communicate to be sure we knew what words people were finding, since the grid was so big no one person could look at the whole thing. We eventually figured out all our non-meta answers 6 letters or longer were hidden, except one, which a message spelled out in semaphore by the pairs of overlapping answers told us to look for. Good thing we came into this puzzle with all the answers. :-) This took us a little over an hour to complete, the longest of the events, and from what I hear, we did good to finish it in that time, though in fact most of the lead teams came in with most of the answers and backsolved some of their missing ones from this event. The actual answer here was REPRISE, the first answer we backsolved at the start of the hunt; this choice made sure that nearly all teams would have this answer.
I actually sat out this one because I was too tired to be effective at searching for words, and even at our team size not everybody could fit around the puzzle. When we left this event, our guide ran to the next event, and we had to try hard to keep up. I think this is because our time here secured us a solid lead.
Update: I've added a photo of Luck's solved copy of this word search. Spoilers, if you look closely enough, of course. The room I have it in is barely long enough to contain the entire puzzle.
Perception: Identifying Puzzles
The Anglerfish's room at the bottom of the ocean in building 66 was very dark so that they could project images of parts of puzzles and "images we would have seen while solving puzzles." We had 40 bubbles to eliminate. Each correct puzzle title eliminated a bubble. Each wrong title added a bubble, and the picture was still there to continue guessing. We could pass one we were stuck on, at a cost of having 3 bubbles added. I think we passed 2 or 3 times and got one or two wrong, but made it through fairly quickly, all things considered.
At one point the Goosebumps books from the ERMAHGERD girl's picture came up, and everybody started yelling ERMAHGERD and laughing all over again for about 30 seconds before we got serious and gave the name of the puzzle (Graveyard meta).
The Coin
We came back from 66 through the basement, I initially thought to avoid running into another team taking the course we just came in through, but we were led into the basement door to 26-100 that opens onto the stage area in front. Before we entered, we were warned that the room contains an extremely powerful magnet which we should be sure not to stand immediately next to if we have a pacemaker, and don't put our phones or computers directly on it, and don't touch it with any metal we want to separate from it later. (A neodymium magnet.)
When we entered, at the top of the room we saw the top two rows filled aisle to aisle with members of Random. The Kraken was there, and told us we needed to identify the lodestone in a single guess, without touching it. People started searching their pockets and belongings for appropriate metal objects, and somebody came up with the collection of chains and locks removed from the treasure chest, which almost certainly would have worked. Our Atlantean guide, however, who had taken our magnetowhatsit for "safe keeping" back in building 13, stepped forward and said she had upgraded the device, and handed Dalryaug, who had stepped forward as team leader to do the final task, a real metal detector. She briefly showed him how it worked, and he went up to the collection of rocks and got a very clearly audible beep from the penultimate one. So we guessed that one, and won at 5:02 AM Sunday.
The "rocks" we tested were actually painted styrofoam, I think, one of them with the neodymium magnet inside it, but they needed to keep that for other teams to complete the runaround. They gave us a big (grapefruit-sized) chunk of real lodestone (magnetite) instead, which some people marveled at the weight of (the iron in it, I guess). We also got the neodymium magnet at the wrapup, and the commemorative coins. I joked about taking it to the glass-walled materials science lab down the hall from our HQ in building 4 and having those guys cut it into chunks for everybody, but we left it whole. (This is the lab with the visible band saw, anvil, and other crazy tools.)
After we celebrated for about half an hour, they asked us to leave so that another team could finish their runaround.
Statistics
This DEEP chart (from Dr. Nautilus's tumblr) is the only set of solving stats we have so far, and since DEEP mostly came from solves (though metas and some rounds were worth more than other puzzles), since we all got the puzzles in the same order, this is a pretty good indicator of progress. It seems we and Palindrome were neck and neck through the early going, and Codex was also close, but about 9 hours in, right after we got our treasure chest, we pulled away from the pack and held the lead until the last hours before our final meta solve. It looks like at 13 hours we were briefly ahead by about 50 DEEP, which is roughly an entire round, and about 17 hours in, once we got into Atlantis and the solving pace slowed down, we were briefly about 4 hours ahead of the next team to reach the same point. This makes sense given how long we were stuck on the final meta-meta.
The burst right after we reached Atlantis at about 16.5 hours in appears to be from the point we finished the school of fish meta and backsolved most of the remaining fish. From 5:29 to 6:09 AM Saturday, we solved the school of fish meta (worth 10 DEEP), Captain Planet (no DEEP), and 10 regular puzzles, one of them from a workshop round and worth 3.9 DEEP, one from Atlantis and worth 4.8 DEEP, and the rest from school of fish and worth 2.0 DEEP each, for a total of 34.7 DEEP in 40 minutes. Interestingly, meta-metas and the Aquatic Acquaintances puzzles, which unlocked interactions, did not award DEEP (or at least our team log does not show any).