(no subject)
With only 135 days left to go before the start of the 2011 MIT Mystery Hunt, it's probably past time I actually posted the write-up that I wrote (months ago) about the 2010 MIT Mystery Hunt...
Friday 15 January 2010
Woke up at 7am, this despite the fact that my alarm wasn't scheduled to go off for another hour. Both unable to go back to sleep and unwilling to contemplate the very idea. I was bouncing up and down in excitement like a small child on Christmas morning. Mystery Hunt! Mystery Hunt! Mystery Hunt!
Showered, dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen where the usual giant pile of team supplies waited. Set to work loading the car as excited texts began to stream in from bubblebabble.
Made fairly short work of loading the car before I bent sideways at just the wrong angle causing something quite painful to happen to my back. Not an auspicious start to Mystery Hunt. Finished loading the car gingerly and gulped some advil in hopes it might help the situation. So painful. Heated seat warmers proved to be my savior and by the time I made it to MIT I wasn't hobbling quite as badly as I had been.
Pulled into the drop off area next to building 26 and Called bubblebabble to bring the cart. He showed up grinning a few moments later. Mystery Hunt!
This year's cart proved quite smaller than last year's cart so queue sent back down for the second load. "Happy Hunt Day!" he greeted me enthusiastically.
Moved my car over to the parking garage by the Marriott with the plan of having someone move it for me later in the evening and headed back to team headquarters. bubblebabble and queue had been hard at work unpacking boxes in my absence, both quite amused to find food items tucked into almost every box. Apparently I'd bought a lot of food for the occasion.
A knock on the door announced the arrival of Christiane a producer with a European television station who was filming a documentary (in french and german) about Mystery Hunt, when the call had gone out for teams willing to allow the television station to film, I had dashed off a quick reply to say that they were welcome to film us though they should keep in mind that we were a small team unlikely to advance very far. She had come to introduce herself and her camera crew and assured me that they would be popping in and out all weekend.
bubblebabble and I had had a lively discussion the week before about how best to set up team headquarters. We were concerned that between the added people we expected this year and the film crew that our usual set up wasn't going to provide a lot of space, so quite a lot of attention given to how best to set up our work space so as to utilize the entire space (as opposed to our usual habit of clustering everyone and everything right underneath the solve board).
Some last minute debate about a few minor items but we were in good shape and the room was fully set up with half an hour to go before the kick off. And we even had our first solve, which was to say that a blue (solve) card already adorning the board, this one for bubblebabble's miraculous set up of our new private team wireless network. Apparently bubblebabble had been up since the wee hours to accomplish it.
We were ready! Before noon! Unheard of! A few of our teammates began to trickle in, rccap wandered down from his office directly above us, Mark (a friend of cobie) arrived and magid walked in the door just as I was telling queue to expect her.
It was time, left queue to hold down the fort and headed off to lobby 7 with the rest of my teammates. Waved excitedly at the people I run into only at kickoff and found a spot for the group of us to stand and wait, which is to say jump up and down excitedly while grinning like an idiot. I was so excited.
This year the hunt organizers had decided to eliminate the problem of bad acoustics in Lobby 7 by issuing an audio recording of the dialogue in the days leading up to the hunt. As such everyone in the room clutched an ipod or similar device and while it wasn't perfectly synced, it wasn't a bad method, certainly it's the only time I've ever understood the opening skit. I can only imagine what we looked like, a giant crowd of people crammed together in silence, occasionally erupting into song (Happy Birthday MIT Mystery Hunt), but otherwise very little in the way of audible sound.
Basic hunt premise was that this was the 30th anniversary of the MIT Mystery Hunt and as such rather than have a typical hunt, we would have a single round of ten puzzles which would probably take us the afternoon to complete, after that the rest of the weekend would be dedicated to celebrating the Mystery Hunt's anniversary by way of a big party. What could go wrong?
The hunt URL was announced and captains sent forward to verify their team info and collect the welcome letter. My team had gone ahead without me but through the use of a handy shortcut, I caught just as they made it back to our room, literally racing bubblebabble the last few feet to the door.
A few more people had arrived in our absence so said our hellos and claimed a spot at one of the tables. 12:20 by this point and the hunt server set to go live at 12:30. Started pressing reload eagerly on the page. 12:30 came and went and still the site wasn't live. Puzzles! Where were our puzzles?!?!?!?!
And then, finally, it was live and we all dove for our machines only to discover that there was only one actual puzzle on the site and it seemed to be a Meta. Uh oh. Printed out several copies and took a look at it as a team. The flavor text was quite helpful and we had some good ideas as to what to do with it except for the fact that we were missing some highly pertinent information. A quick perusal of the source code of the hunt page assured us that this was in fact the only puzzle but just at that moment the rest of the puzzles on the site went live. Ok, good that made a bit more sense.
The rest of my team dove in immediately but I took a few minutes in my role of team captain to get the puzzle names on the board and organized.
Quick perusal of the puzzles led to the discovery of one (TUO YRREJ PEEK) that basically called for us to make a 3-4 minute remake of an existing movie. Quick call to Stephanie, still at work to tell her about it and ask her to bring a camera and the requisite camera equipment while queue called in the dummy answer so that we could get our film assignment.
Call came in a few minutes later, we were to make a "swede" version of "Donnie Darko". I called Stephanie to let her know, pleased to hear that while she hadn't seen the movie, she had read the book. Confident that that puzzle was in competent hands I turned my attention the the rest of the puzzles. bubblebabble and Jessica were already caught up in TRAINING EXERCISE, queue was working on FUN WITH NUMBERS and rccap and magid were making good progress on BANNER HEADLINE.
As MAKING CONNECTIONS seemed the most spacial of the puzzles, I decided to turn my attention to it and quickly has Mark roped in. The puzzle in question featured a grid of dots each with an item of some sort written just below it. Quick perusal determined that these items seemed to come in sets. For example there were James Bond films, Red Dwarf episodes, the names of chose your own adventure stories, a whole bunch of ways to cook shrimp (that ended up being from Forest Gump) and all sorts of other nonsense. Realized that each of these items were things on a list and could me given a unique number based on their position on said list. As I was certain we were looking at a dot-to-dot, this made good sense and we were off identifying and numbering items.
My cousin Courtney arrived midafternoon and we roped her into helping us identify and order the items in our puzzle. By this time we has noticed that each group of items were coming in sets of three. Which is to say that we were being given a series of consecutive things on a list, then it would skip an item and we would get another series of consecutive things (typically in a different location on the page). The end result was 3 distinct groupings from each type of item.
By this time more people were starting to arrive so I left the puzzle in Mark and Courtney's capable hands and bustled around playing team captain, getting people set up to work, helping them find a good starting place and just generally organizing things. Lots of phone calls and e-mails from team members who were still at work looking to know what they could do to help. Directed them to puzzles that nobody was working on and just generally took some time out to get things organized.
As we worked the solves began to pour in first TRAINING EXERCISE, then GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE and RUNNING IN CIRCLES which had involved identifying a number of locations long the Charles and forced sauergeek and I out to take a cold walk just as it was starting to get dark.
The European camera crew (that I had inadvertently invited to use us as one of their subjects for a documentary they were filming), wandered in and out at will, sticking their cameras in people's faces and conducting impromptu interviews. It was a little surreal but my team seemed mostly amused by the whole thing for which I was grateful.
Stephanie showed up with Slade and Jared in tow and she and Jared claimed a small table in one corner of the room to create their video masterpiece. They'd done some research before they'd left school about just which scenes they'd need to show to best capture the essence of Donnie Darko. They set to work, detailing scenes, writing a script and assembling a list of props and music they would need. As Mark and Courtney were making good progress without me (they'd discovered that the letters in the puzzle were airport codes), I didn't feel guilty leaving them to it while I helped Stephanie.
Dinner arrived just as she was fine tuning her list and as the rest of my team helped themselves to chinese food (Courtney very excited to see an eggplant dish that was almost impossible to acquire outside of China), I made an axe.
And then it was time for the crew to head out filming. Stephanie has imperiously decided on rccap and kirkjerk for her two main characters and as they were in need of a house for their set, I sent them off to rccap's apartment to begin their filming.
Tried to ignore the subtle warning signs of my body that it really wasn't doing all that well. I was determined not to get sick for mystery hunt and I refused to acknowledge that such a thing might be happening but as the hour got later it seemed more and more inevitable.
By this time, another round of puzzles had opened up (apparently something had happened and due to a temporal anomaly this was no longer the 30th anniversary of the hunt but rather the 300th) and a few of my teammates were already making good progress on them. Mark and Courtney were still dealing with airports, it seemed we had a number of European airports and 3 outliers, one each in Cuba, Cambodia and Australia. not sure quite what we were supposed to do with them but the puzzle title was Making Connections so Courtney, expert traveler that she is, set to work mapping out the connections between them. Apparently they were predominately tiny airports with few if any direct flights between them.
At some point our impromptu film crew returned, and when kirkjerk walked into the room I burst out laughing. He was a bunny! Where was the documentary team when we needed them, this should be documented for prosperity.
Apparently there's a creepy rabbit character in the donnie darko movie and through the use of a fur blanket and a lot of tin foil, kirkjerk had been transformed into the creature. He looked amazing (and long suffering, hurrah for having a martyr on the team). Apparently Stephanie had decided to use rccap as Donnie and in an effort to make him look more authentic she had blackened his eyes, he looked dreadful.
Stephanie and Jared seemed quite pleased with the footage they had collected so far and when I had stopped laughing hysterically, they proceeded to shanghai quite a number of us as extras in the next scene of their movie. My cousin Courtney was elected to play the role of Donnie's friend Gretchen and told that the plan was to grab footage of her laying dead under the tires of a car. Headed out to the parking lot to accomplish just that, Jared grabbing several packages of ketchup on the way so that he could properly decorate her face with blood.
Chose a random car in the lot to make Courtney lay beneath and Stephanie lit the shot with her headlights, convenient as the car could then double for the vehicle in which Donnie and his friend arrive on the scene. Myself I was roped into playing the role of an old hag ("you'll be a natural," said Jared.) and several shots were taken before we were dismissing to return to team headquarters.
By this time I really wasn't feeling well so it was somewhat halfheartedly that I sat down and poked at things. Did some more organizational work (we'd unlocked a few more puzzles) and started to coordinate people for the night shift and for the upcoming live events.
Our film team returned eventually and as Jared had to supervise Saturday detention first thing in the morning he, Stephanie and Slade headed home. Slade most reluctant to go. The rest of us back to work on our puzzles, Mark and Courtney were still trying to figure out how to make connections and the rest of us were busy identifying satellite images from across the country (SIGHTSEEING).
Around this time two members of the puzzle construction team wandered in to visit and we greeted them with open arms, and food. Apparently one of the highlights of being on the construction team is the food during team visits. Our two visitors quite interested to see what we were up to but completely unwilling to give advice. More than willing to stand around looking smug as we puzzled things aloud however and to assure us that we were in fact very very close.
Apparently silent (albeit supportive) observation was exactly what we needed and it galvanized the team to action which is to say that they went back to staring at Banner Headline and trying to figure out how to synthesize the final answer. One of our visitors left as while determined, we weren't exactly quick. However our other visitor stayed as she was eager to see us "get it" and she continued to sit there smiling mysteriously as my team talked their way through the puzzle. They tried several methods and actually stumbled across the solution word while trying to figure out the solve method but our visitor did a very good job of not reacting while simultaneously not allowing them to call in guesses, she wanted them to solve it properly as she suspected that they would otherwise feel gipped by the solution.
And so the majority of my team huddled around a desk staring at the work that had been done. One of this year's additions to our team headquarters was a series of posters on the front board documenting a few puzzle solving suggestions that we'd picked up over the last two hunts. Our visitor seemed quite impressed by this list of rules and her only suggestion was that we obey them.
Meanwhile, I really wasn't doing very well. My body hated me and as I sat there I grew gradually sicker and sicker and curled in upon myself. As I'd done the year before I'd gotten a hotel room for the team at the local Marriott but as we'd ended up with slightly more people needing crash space than we'd expected, I'd given up my key earlier in the evening with the intention of crashing at rccap's place.
And so I waited, huddling further and further in upon myself as he wrestled with the final solution to Banner Headline. Eventually he got it. The missing piece has required overlaying the French Flag on our grid (appropriately colored) answers and he was gleeful to have solved it properly.
We said goodbye to our visitor and with my last energy I finished arranging for team members to attend the various live events and to stay in the room through the night. That done, it was time for bed and poor rccap had to provide assistance as we walked across campus to reclaim my car from the garage.
I was burning up with fever and could barely stand by the time we made it to the garage so nothing for it but to hand my keys to rccap and ask him to drive us across campus to another lot in which I could leave my car for the remainder of the weekend.
While rccap was able to drive stick, it wasn't something he had done in a number of years so our trip from one side of campus to the other was a tad harrowing. More correctly, the journey through the parking garage was harrowing, as fearful of stalling, rccap kept the car moving at far greater a speed than strictly necessary.
He also stalled twice as we were exiting the garage, much to the amusement of the attendant. Made it back to his place eventually and curled up in a miserable heap on the couch while he attempted to bring some order to his room. This because Stephanie and Jared had trashed the place, even going so far as to flip his mattress, in the process of filming their masterpiece.
Took some nyquil in an attempt to bring down my fever and collapsed exhausted into bed.
Saturday 16 January 2010
rccap got up around 9am and wandered back to team headquarters. As I was still burning up with fever, I consumed more nyquil and went right back to sleep.
My fever finally broke sometime in the midafternoon and a few hours later I gathered the energy to drag myself back into team headquarters. People had come and gone while I was unconscious and worse, I'd missed jalbro's bacon delivery. Fortunately there were a few crumbs left, and even more important, a full container of jamba juice awaited me. Bliss.
Food helped enormously and by the time I sat down to start work on puzzles I was actually functional.
I puttered around, worked on some organizational tasks and tried to get my brain to focus on SEEKING SYREN SCOTCHY. A spacial logic puzzle that I typically would have delighted in. Alas, rccap and Jessica were just a little bit faster than me and they found the solution when I was only halfway done.
Went back to organizing as a few more puzzles had been unlocked and saw one (CASTING SPELLS)that involved sending 2 team mates off on a misadventure. Convinced rccap to go and was attempting to convince a second person when Jess walked in the door. Perfect! Sent her with rccap.
rccap came rushing back a few minutes later, begging for a replacement. Apparently their task involved throwing frisbees which is not something at which he excels. Jess later informed me that his face went ghost white when he saw what was ahead of him. Fortunately we had Slade, who was more than up for the task so sent him off and put rccap to work on something else.
jagheterlelle showed up, bringing with her a piece of random embroidery. Apparently one of the puzzles (QUICK PAWS) that had unlocked while I was sleeping was a knitting pattern so she had convinced kadnkadnkto knit it for us. We'd all been expecting some sort of witch's hat type thing but apparently it was a circular knitting pattern and what we had resembled a small knitted circle with a number of raised areas. Were they letters we wondered? OCD, well that's an appropriate answer, called it in.
Meanwhile with only 20 minutes to go, Stephanie was putting the finishing touches on our "swede" film. It was output, compressed and uploaded to youtube with only minutes to spare! Jared had just finished giving an interview in German and as they had an hour or so to spare before the film screening, they headed off to collect Slade and find something to eat.
In the time that I'd been gone, several new rounds of puzzles had become available to us including a round of puzzles from the 1980's that had been handed to us on paper rather than posted on the web.
Headed off to find a photocopier to procure additional copies of them and then settled down with rccap to work on EDITS. This puzzle appeared to be a dialog of some sort with strings of words (such as "the degenerate gamblers", "persecuted by unscrupulous whores" and "the sleazy brothel in the sky", the last of which frequently made me want to burst into song) substituted for actual letters. No wonder they had to give it to us on paper, it would have been far too simple to figure out what it said if we'd had a digital version.
So this is what they used to do to make puzzles "harder"! rccap and I went at it with slew of colored pencils, color coding each phrase as it appeared so that we could more accurately transcribe it. To amuse ourselves we frequently quoted the phrases aloud. One of us would declare, "actually this is a lot of fun" to which the other would reply "this is complete bullshit". Grumbling and declaring, "MORE weird puzzle shit", was another popular exclamation. By the time we were an hour into it, our teammates looked ready to kill us. No matter, we remained inordinately amused by the whole thing.
Ran the final text through a cryptogram solver and while it obviously said something, we hadn't a clue what any of it meant.
A good place to take a break, just as well as there were a few random organizational things that I needed to deal with and magid had just started in on one of the other 1984 puzzles and rccap was itching to join her.
rccap well and truly sucked in by the time I'd finished my organizational duties so decided to revisit the original 2010 meta while he worked on BUILDING A MYSTERY. Printed out a clean copy of the META and got to work.
Around the edge of the paper were a series of grids each made up of 6 boxes, each of which were looking for two particular letters from each of the solution words from the first round puzzles. According to the flavor text we were looking for binary letters as defined by whether or not each of the two letter combinations were a state, a top level domain and a chemical.
Double checked my answers and ended up with a few differences from the answers we'd been working with, clearly exhaustion had led to some transcription errors. Double checked everything but the binary just didn't look right. At this point we had more than half of the first round answers which was enough to give us a definite match on a number of the letters and to narrow the others down significantly.
Indeed it seemed like we should have enough info to make some logical guesses as to what the message said but the letters didn't seem to be of much use. Indeed I seemed to have way too many K's and not nearly enough vowels.
"Sanity check me," I begged my teammates but rccap was far too caught up in his puzzle and sauergeek was of the opinion that it had to be right even if it looked ridiculous and that I should keep going. "I have several boxes that don't fit the pattern of legal braille patterns," I tried to tell them but they seemed convinced that rather than simply using the braille alphabet, actual braille words were being used and as such I should expect them to look strange.
"OK", I conceded and went back to working on other things. cobie and Anthony had shown up by this time and they were hard at work on MIssed Connections. Anthony moving mountains to reposition the 3 outlier airports in Europe. Impressive.
They still weren't sure what to do once they'd all been relocated however so we sat and brainstormed for a bit. I kept coming back to the list of rules. Was there someway to apply what we'd already done to the next step. was there some way of ordering the different items that had originally defined the airport codes based on what those items were or their numbers or some other attribute. cobie and Anthony didn't seem to think any of that would work and as they knew far more about the puzzle than I did at this point, I wandered back to poke at other things.
By this time rccap was finishing the final construction of Reynold, the large 3D object that he and magid had been patiently constructing for the last few hours. They were very pleased with themselves.
Nearly 3am at this point and probably past time I went to bed considering I'd been sick. rccap on the fence as to whether he should stay through the night and keep solving or whether he should sleep for a few hours so that he was ready to go come morning. Based on the length of the last two hunts, figured we were in no dangers of things ending any time soon so he opted for the well rested option.
Headed back to his place to sleep.
Sunday 17 January 2010
Awoken by a phone call from bubblebabble round about 10am. Hunt is over, the coin was found at 5am but the puzzle server is up till noon, if there were any puzzles we were desperate to solve, now was the time to come finish them. Threw on clothes and headed in.
Found bubblebabble alone in the room thought sauergeek showed up soon after. really really wanted to solve the meta and fairly certain we could do it if we had one more first round answer. Very close to a solution on THE OBLIGATORY DANCE VIDEO PUZZLE just had to put the final pieces together so bubblebabble and sauergeek to work on that.
Meanwhile rccap and I took another look at Banner Headlines. More specifically we took a look at the 300 version of it as well as all the flavor text we'd acquired along the way in hopes that the info we needed to solve a changed version of it was there. Nothing relevant in any of the documents so tried a different approach, looking through flag databases and overlaying other flag variations in hopes something might fall out. No luck.
bubblebabble and sauergeek solved their puzzle with 20 mins to go so I took another look at the binary. Rather than helping this made it even worse. Clearly we were doing something wrong and not enough time to start from scratch. Time to let it go. Damn.
Realized we'd forgotten to take the obligatory team photo so the four of us that remained arrayed ourselves in front of the progress board for a partial picture.
About time to pack it in so started picking up and reorganizing the room. How very sad to see it shift back to its usual appearance. Packed up the left over food for rccap, who is the embodiment of the starving grad student in that he will gladly acquire food from anywhere.
Washed down the tables, reassembled the room and were pleased to note that the only broken chair was the one that had originally come with the room. Packed up the cars and when the room once again matched the original images, turned off the lights for another year.
Wrap up was to take place later that evening so not really worth going home. So headed over to rccap's place with sauergeek. Left sauergeek happily enmeshed in front of a sporting event of some sort and took a nap.
Back to the wrap up just in time though found this year's wrapup dragged on in a way I don't remember previous ones doing. Perhaps this is because I much prefer the random stories and glimpse of life behind the scenes to the cut and dry dissection of how all the puzzles worked.
That said quite amused by the general structure of the hunt. Apparently had we solved that original meta we would have gotten to take part in a mini run around at which point the coin would have been zapped back in time. (Opening up puzzles from previous years). As the meta from each year was solved, documentation about the changes in history that had occurred because of the coin's journey through time were provided and this history changed key information needed to solve each of the 10 original puzzles. So rccap and I had been right when we assumed that banner headline would need a different flag. Indeed, apparently it needed the gay pride flag as opposed to the french flag, a change that led to an entirely different solution.
Picked up our team progress sheet when the wrap up was over and said goodbye to sauergeek. Quite hungry so rccap and I grabbed a pizza. I headed home soon after and collapsed exhausted into bed as soon as I got there.
Despite my illness, Mystery Hunt once again proved to be a fabulous use of a weekend and I look forward to doing it all over again in January. For those of you who wish to explore a few of the puzzles in more depth, the links to the puzzle websites (as seen by the teams) are below.
The original 30th anniversary Hunt website
The 300th anniversary Hunt website
Friday 15 January 2010
Woke up at 7am, this despite the fact that my alarm wasn't scheduled to go off for another hour. Both unable to go back to sleep and unwilling to contemplate the very idea. I was bouncing up and down in excitement like a small child on Christmas morning. Mystery Hunt! Mystery Hunt! Mystery Hunt!
Showered, dressed and headed downstairs to the kitchen where the usual giant pile of team supplies waited. Set to work loading the car as excited texts began to stream in from bubblebabble.
Made fairly short work of loading the car before I bent sideways at just the wrong angle causing something quite painful to happen to my back. Not an auspicious start to Mystery Hunt. Finished loading the car gingerly and gulped some advil in hopes it might help the situation. So painful. Heated seat warmers proved to be my savior and by the time I made it to MIT I wasn't hobbling quite as badly as I had been.
Pulled into the drop off area next to building 26 and Called bubblebabble to bring the cart. He showed up grinning a few moments later. Mystery Hunt!
This year's cart proved quite smaller than last year's cart so queue sent back down for the second load. "Happy Hunt Day!" he greeted me enthusiastically.
Moved my car over to the parking garage by the Marriott with the plan of having someone move it for me later in the evening and headed back to team headquarters. bubblebabble and queue had been hard at work unpacking boxes in my absence, both quite amused to find food items tucked into almost every box. Apparently I'd bought a lot of food for the occasion.
A knock on the door announced the arrival of Christiane a producer with a European television station who was filming a documentary (in french and german) about Mystery Hunt, when the call had gone out for teams willing to allow the television station to film, I had dashed off a quick reply to say that they were welcome to film us though they should keep in mind that we were a small team unlikely to advance very far. She had come to introduce herself and her camera crew and assured me that they would be popping in and out all weekend.
bubblebabble and I had had a lively discussion the week before about how best to set up team headquarters. We were concerned that between the added people we expected this year and the film crew that our usual set up wasn't going to provide a lot of space, so quite a lot of attention given to how best to set up our work space so as to utilize the entire space (as opposed to our usual habit of clustering everyone and everything right underneath the solve board).
Some last minute debate about a few minor items but we were in good shape and the room was fully set up with half an hour to go before the kick off. And we even had our first solve, which was to say that a blue (solve) card already adorning the board, this one for bubblebabble's miraculous set up of our new private team wireless network. Apparently bubblebabble had been up since the wee hours to accomplish it.
We were ready! Before noon! Unheard of! A few of our teammates began to trickle in, rccap wandered down from his office directly above us, Mark (a friend of cobie) arrived and magid walked in the door just as I was telling queue to expect her.
It was time, left queue to hold down the fort and headed off to lobby 7 with the rest of my teammates. Waved excitedly at the people I run into only at kickoff and found a spot for the group of us to stand and wait, which is to say jump up and down excitedly while grinning like an idiot. I was so excited.
This year the hunt organizers had decided to eliminate the problem of bad acoustics in Lobby 7 by issuing an audio recording of the dialogue in the days leading up to the hunt. As such everyone in the room clutched an ipod or similar device and while it wasn't perfectly synced, it wasn't a bad method, certainly it's the only time I've ever understood the opening skit. I can only imagine what we looked like, a giant crowd of people crammed together in silence, occasionally erupting into song (Happy Birthday MIT Mystery Hunt), but otherwise very little in the way of audible sound.
Basic hunt premise was that this was the 30th anniversary of the MIT Mystery Hunt and as such rather than have a typical hunt, we would have a single round of ten puzzles which would probably take us the afternoon to complete, after that the rest of the weekend would be dedicated to celebrating the Mystery Hunt's anniversary by way of a big party. What could go wrong?
The hunt URL was announced and captains sent forward to verify their team info and collect the welcome letter. My team had gone ahead without me but through the use of a handy shortcut, I caught just as they made it back to our room, literally racing bubblebabble the last few feet to the door.
A few more people had arrived in our absence so said our hellos and claimed a spot at one of the tables. 12:20 by this point and the hunt server set to go live at 12:30. Started pressing reload eagerly on the page. 12:30 came and went and still the site wasn't live. Puzzles! Where were our puzzles?!?!?!?!
And then, finally, it was live and we all dove for our machines only to discover that there was only one actual puzzle on the site and it seemed to be a Meta. Uh oh. Printed out several copies and took a look at it as a team. The flavor text was quite helpful and we had some good ideas as to what to do with it except for the fact that we were missing some highly pertinent information. A quick perusal of the source code of the hunt page assured us that this was in fact the only puzzle but just at that moment the rest of the puzzles on the site went live. Ok, good that made a bit more sense.
The rest of my team dove in immediately but I took a few minutes in my role of team captain to get the puzzle names on the board and organized.
Quick perusal of the puzzles led to the discovery of one (TUO YRREJ PEEK) that basically called for us to make a 3-4 minute remake of an existing movie. Quick call to Stephanie, still at work to tell her about it and ask her to bring a camera and the requisite camera equipment while queue called in the dummy answer so that we could get our film assignment.
Call came in a few minutes later, we were to make a "swede" version of "Donnie Darko". I called Stephanie to let her know, pleased to hear that while she hadn't seen the movie, she had read the book. Confident that that puzzle was in competent hands I turned my attention the the rest of the puzzles. bubblebabble and Jessica were already caught up in TRAINING EXERCISE, queue was working on FUN WITH NUMBERS and rccap and magid were making good progress on BANNER HEADLINE.
As MAKING CONNECTIONS seemed the most spacial of the puzzles, I decided to turn my attention to it and quickly has Mark roped in. The puzzle in question featured a grid of dots each with an item of some sort written just below it. Quick perusal determined that these items seemed to come in sets. For example there were James Bond films, Red Dwarf episodes, the names of chose your own adventure stories, a whole bunch of ways to cook shrimp (that ended up being from Forest Gump) and all sorts of other nonsense. Realized that each of these items were things on a list and could me given a unique number based on their position on said list. As I was certain we were looking at a dot-to-dot, this made good sense and we were off identifying and numbering items.
My cousin Courtney arrived midafternoon and we roped her into helping us identify and order the items in our puzzle. By this time we has noticed that each group of items were coming in sets of three. Which is to say that we were being given a series of consecutive things on a list, then it would skip an item and we would get another series of consecutive things (typically in a different location on the page). The end result was 3 distinct groupings from each type of item.
By this time more people were starting to arrive so I left the puzzle in Mark and Courtney's capable hands and bustled around playing team captain, getting people set up to work, helping them find a good starting place and just generally organizing things. Lots of phone calls and e-mails from team members who were still at work looking to know what they could do to help. Directed them to puzzles that nobody was working on and just generally took some time out to get things organized.
As we worked the solves began to pour in first TRAINING EXERCISE, then GREAT MINDS THINK ALIKE and RUNNING IN CIRCLES which had involved identifying a number of locations long the Charles and forced sauergeek and I out to take a cold walk just as it was starting to get dark.
The European camera crew (that I had inadvertently invited to use us as one of their subjects for a documentary they were filming), wandered in and out at will, sticking their cameras in people's faces and conducting impromptu interviews. It was a little surreal but my team seemed mostly amused by the whole thing for which I was grateful.
Stephanie showed up with Slade and Jared in tow and she and Jared claimed a small table in one corner of the room to create their video masterpiece. They'd done some research before they'd left school about just which scenes they'd need to show to best capture the essence of Donnie Darko. They set to work, detailing scenes, writing a script and assembling a list of props and music they would need. As Mark and Courtney were making good progress without me (they'd discovered that the letters in the puzzle were airport codes), I didn't feel guilty leaving them to it while I helped Stephanie.
Dinner arrived just as she was fine tuning her list and as the rest of my team helped themselves to chinese food (Courtney very excited to see an eggplant dish that was almost impossible to acquire outside of China), I made an axe.
And then it was time for the crew to head out filming. Stephanie has imperiously decided on rccap and kirkjerk for her two main characters and as they were in need of a house for their set, I sent them off to rccap's apartment to begin their filming.
Tried to ignore the subtle warning signs of my body that it really wasn't doing all that well. I was determined not to get sick for mystery hunt and I refused to acknowledge that such a thing might be happening but as the hour got later it seemed more and more inevitable.
By this time, another round of puzzles had opened up (apparently something had happened and due to a temporal anomaly this was no longer the 30th anniversary of the hunt but rather the 300th) and a few of my teammates were already making good progress on them. Mark and Courtney were still dealing with airports, it seemed we had a number of European airports and 3 outliers, one each in Cuba, Cambodia and Australia. not sure quite what we were supposed to do with them but the puzzle title was Making Connections so Courtney, expert traveler that she is, set to work mapping out the connections between them. Apparently they were predominately tiny airports with few if any direct flights between them.
At some point our impromptu film crew returned, and when kirkjerk walked into the room I burst out laughing. He was a bunny! Where was the documentary team when we needed them, this should be documented for prosperity.
Apparently there's a creepy rabbit character in the donnie darko movie and through the use of a fur blanket and a lot of tin foil, kirkjerk had been transformed into the creature. He looked amazing (and long suffering, hurrah for having a martyr on the team). Apparently Stephanie had decided to use rccap as Donnie and in an effort to make him look more authentic she had blackened his eyes, he looked dreadful.
Stephanie and Jared seemed quite pleased with the footage they had collected so far and when I had stopped laughing hysterically, they proceeded to shanghai quite a number of us as extras in the next scene of their movie. My cousin Courtney was elected to play the role of Donnie's friend Gretchen and told that the plan was to grab footage of her laying dead under the tires of a car. Headed out to the parking lot to accomplish just that, Jared grabbing several packages of ketchup on the way so that he could properly decorate her face with blood.
Chose a random car in the lot to make Courtney lay beneath and Stephanie lit the shot with her headlights, convenient as the car could then double for the vehicle in which Donnie and his friend arrive on the scene. Myself I was roped into playing the role of an old hag ("you'll be a natural," said Jared.) and several shots were taken before we were dismissing to return to team headquarters.
By this time I really wasn't feeling well so it was somewhat halfheartedly that I sat down and poked at things. Did some more organizational work (we'd unlocked a few more puzzles) and started to coordinate people for the night shift and for the upcoming live events.
Our film team returned eventually and as Jared had to supervise Saturday detention first thing in the morning he, Stephanie and Slade headed home. Slade most reluctant to go. The rest of us back to work on our puzzles, Mark and Courtney were still trying to figure out how to make connections and the rest of us were busy identifying satellite images from across the country (SIGHTSEEING).
Around this time two members of the puzzle construction team wandered in to visit and we greeted them with open arms, and food. Apparently one of the highlights of being on the construction team is the food during team visits. Our two visitors quite interested to see what we were up to but completely unwilling to give advice. More than willing to stand around looking smug as we puzzled things aloud however and to assure us that we were in fact very very close.
Apparently silent (albeit supportive) observation was exactly what we needed and it galvanized the team to action which is to say that they went back to staring at Banner Headline and trying to figure out how to synthesize the final answer. One of our visitors left as while determined, we weren't exactly quick. However our other visitor stayed as she was eager to see us "get it" and she continued to sit there smiling mysteriously as my team talked their way through the puzzle. They tried several methods and actually stumbled across the solution word while trying to figure out the solve method but our visitor did a very good job of not reacting while simultaneously not allowing them to call in guesses, she wanted them to solve it properly as she suspected that they would otherwise feel gipped by the solution.
And so the majority of my team huddled around a desk staring at the work that had been done. One of this year's additions to our team headquarters was a series of posters on the front board documenting a few puzzle solving suggestions that we'd picked up over the last two hunts. Our visitor seemed quite impressed by this list of rules and her only suggestion was that we obey them.
Meanwhile, I really wasn't doing very well. My body hated me and as I sat there I grew gradually sicker and sicker and curled in upon myself. As I'd done the year before I'd gotten a hotel room for the team at the local Marriott but as we'd ended up with slightly more people needing crash space than we'd expected, I'd given up my key earlier in the evening with the intention of crashing at rccap's place.
And so I waited, huddling further and further in upon myself as he wrestled with the final solution to Banner Headline. Eventually he got it. The missing piece has required overlaying the French Flag on our grid (appropriately colored) answers and he was gleeful to have solved it properly.
We said goodbye to our visitor and with my last energy I finished arranging for team members to attend the various live events and to stay in the room through the night. That done, it was time for bed and poor rccap had to provide assistance as we walked across campus to reclaim my car from the garage.
I was burning up with fever and could barely stand by the time we made it to the garage so nothing for it but to hand my keys to rccap and ask him to drive us across campus to another lot in which I could leave my car for the remainder of the weekend.
While rccap was able to drive stick, it wasn't something he had done in a number of years so our trip from one side of campus to the other was a tad harrowing. More correctly, the journey through the parking garage was harrowing, as fearful of stalling, rccap kept the car moving at far greater a speed than strictly necessary.
He also stalled twice as we were exiting the garage, much to the amusement of the attendant. Made it back to his place eventually and curled up in a miserable heap on the couch while he attempted to bring some order to his room. This because Stephanie and Jared had trashed the place, even going so far as to flip his mattress, in the process of filming their masterpiece.
Took some nyquil in an attempt to bring down my fever and collapsed exhausted into bed.
Saturday 16 January 2010
rccap got up around 9am and wandered back to team headquarters. As I was still burning up with fever, I consumed more nyquil and went right back to sleep.
My fever finally broke sometime in the midafternoon and a few hours later I gathered the energy to drag myself back into team headquarters. People had come and gone while I was unconscious and worse, I'd missed jalbro's bacon delivery. Fortunately there were a few crumbs left, and even more important, a full container of jamba juice awaited me. Bliss.
Food helped enormously and by the time I sat down to start work on puzzles I was actually functional.
I puttered around, worked on some organizational tasks and tried to get my brain to focus on SEEKING SYREN SCOTCHY. A spacial logic puzzle that I typically would have delighted in. Alas, rccap and Jessica were just a little bit faster than me and they found the solution when I was only halfway done.
Went back to organizing as a few more puzzles had been unlocked and saw one (CASTING SPELLS)that involved sending 2 team mates off on a misadventure. Convinced rccap to go and was attempting to convince a second person when Jess walked in the door. Perfect! Sent her with rccap.
rccap came rushing back a few minutes later, begging for a replacement. Apparently their task involved throwing frisbees which is not something at which he excels. Jess later informed me that his face went ghost white when he saw what was ahead of him. Fortunately we had Slade, who was more than up for the task so sent him off and put rccap to work on something else.
jagheterlelle showed up, bringing with her a piece of random embroidery. Apparently one of the puzzles (QUICK PAWS) that had unlocked while I was sleeping was a knitting pattern so she had convinced kadnkadnkto knit it for us. We'd all been expecting some sort of witch's hat type thing but apparently it was a circular knitting pattern and what we had resembled a small knitted circle with a number of raised areas. Were they letters we wondered? OCD, well that's an appropriate answer, called it in.
Meanwhile with only 20 minutes to go, Stephanie was putting the finishing touches on our "swede" film. It was output, compressed and uploaded to youtube with only minutes to spare! Jared had just finished giving an interview in German and as they had an hour or so to spare before the film screening, they headed off to collect Slade and find something to eat.
In the time that I'd been gone, several new rounds of puzzles had become available to us including a round of puzzles from the 1980's that had been handed to us on paper rather than posted on the web.
Headed off to find a photocopier to procure additional copies of them and then settled down with rccap to work on EDITS. This puzzle appeared to be a dialog of some sort with strings of words (such as "the degenerate gamblers", "persecuted by unscrupulous whores" and "the sleazy brothel in the sky", the last of which frequently made me want to burst into song) substituted for actual letters. No wonder they had to give it to us on paper, it would have been far too simple to figure out what it said if we'd had a digital version.
So this is what they used to do to make puzzles "harder"! rccap and I went at it with slew of colored pencils, color coding each phrase as it appeared so that we could more accurately transcribe it. To amuse ourselves we frequently quoted the phrases aloud. One of us would declare, "actually this is a lot of fun" to which the other would reply "this is complete bullshit". Grumbling and declaring, "MORE weird puzzle shit", was another popular exclamation. By the time we were an hour into it, our teammates looked ready to kill us. No matter, we remained inordinately amused by the whole thing.
Ran the final text through a cryptogram solver and while it obviously said something, we hadn't a clue what any of it meant.
A good place to take a break, just as well as there were a few random organizational things that I needed to deal with and magid had just started in on one of the other 1984 puzzles and rccap was itching to join her.
rccap well and truly sucked in by the time I'd finished my organizational duties so decided to revisit the original 2010 meta while he worked on BUILDING A MYSTERY. Printed out a clean copy of the META and got to work.
Around the edge of the paper were a series of grids each made up of 6 boxes, each of which were looking for two particular letters from each of the solution words from the first round puzzles. According to the flavor text we were looking for binary letters as defined by whether or not each of the two letter combinations were a state, a top level domain and a chemical.
Double checked my answers and ended up with a few differences from the answers we'd been working with, clearly exhaustion had led to some transcription errors. Double checked everything but the binary just didn't look right. At this point we had more than half of the first round answers which was enough to give us a definite match on a number of the letters and to narrow the others down significantly.
Indeed it seemed like we should have enough info to make some logical guesses as to what the message said but the letters didn't seem to be of much use. Indeed I seemed to have way too many K's and not nearly enough vowels.
"Sanity check me," I begged my teammates but rccap was far too caught up in his puzzle and sauergeek was of the opinion that it had to be right even if it looked ridiculous and that I should keep going. "I have several boxes that don't fit the pattern of legal braille patterns," I tried to tell them but they seemed convinced that rather than simply using the braille alphabet, actual braille words were being used and as such I should expect them to look strange.
"OK", I conceded and went back to working on other things. cobie and Anthony had shown up by this time and they were hard at work on MIssed Connections. Anthony moving mountains to reposition the 3 outlier airports in Europe. Impressive.
They still weren't sure what to do once they'd all been relocated however so we sat and brainstormed for a bit. I kept coming back to the list of rules. Was there someway to apply what we'd already done to the next step. was there some way of ordering the different items that had originally defined the airport codes based on what those items were or their numbers or some other attribute. cobie and Anthony didn't seem to think any of that would work and as they knew far more about the puzzle than I did at this point, I wandered back to poke at other things.
By this time rccap was finishing the final construction of Reynold, the large 3D object that he and magid had been patiently constructing for the last few hours. They were very pleased with themselves.
Nearly 3am at this point and probably past time I went to bed considering I'd been sick. rccap on the fence as to whether he should stay through the night and keep solving or whether he should sleep for a few hours so that he was ready to go come morning. Based on the length of the last two hunts, figured we were in no dangers of things ending any time soon so he opted for the well rested option.
Headed back to his place to sleep.
Sunday 17 January 2010
Awoken by a phone call from bubblebabble round about 10am. Hunt is over, the coin was found at 5am but the puzzle server is up till noon, if there were any puzzles we were desperate to solve, now was the time to come finish them. Threw on clothes and headed in.
Found bubblebabble alone in the room thought sauergeek showed up soon after. really really wanted to solve the meta and fairly certain we could do it if we had one more first round answer. Very close to a solution on THE OBLIGATORY DANCE VIDEO PUZZLE just had to put the final pieces together so bubblebabble and sauergeek to work on that.
Meanwhile rccap and I took another look at Banner Headlines. More specifically we took a look at the 300 version of it as well as all the flavor text we'd acquired along the way in hopes that the info we needed to solve a changed version of it was there. Nothing relevant in any of the documents so tried a different approach, looking through flag databases and overlaying other flag variations in hopes something might fall out. No luck.
bubblebabble and sauergeek solved their puzzle with 20 mins to go so I took another look at the binary. Rather than helping this made it even worse. Clearly we were doing something wrong and not enough time to start from scratch. Time to let it go. Damn.
Realized we'd forgotten to take the obligatory team photo so the four of us that remained arrayed ourselves in front of the progress board for a partial picture.
About time to pack it in so started picking up and reorganizing the room. How very sad to see it shift back to its usual appearance. Packed up the left over food for rccap, who is the embodiment of the starving grad student in that he will gladly acquire food from anywhere.
Washed down the tables, reassembled the room and were pleased to note that the only broken chair was the one that had originally come with the room. Packed up the cars and when the room once again matched the original images, turned off the lights for another year.
Wrap up was to take place later that evening so not really worth going home. So headed over to rccap's place with sauergeek. Left sauergeek happily enmeshed in front of a sporting event of some sort and took a nap.
Back to the wrap up just in time though found this year's wrapup dragged on in a way I don't remember previous ones doing. Perhaps this is because I much prefer the random stories and glimpse of life behind the scenes to the cut and dry dissection of how all the puzzles worked.
That said quite amused by the general structure of the hunt. Apparently had we solved that original meta we would have gotten to take part in a mini run around at which point the coin would have been zapped back in time. (Opening up puzzles from previous years). As the meta from each year was solved, documentation about the changes in history that had occurred because of the coin's journey through time were provided and this history changed key information needed to solve each of the 10 original puzzles. So rccap and I had been right when we assumed that banner headline would need a different flag. Indeed, apparently it needed the gay pride flag as opposed to the french flag, a change that led to an entirely different solution.
Picked up our team progress sheet when the wrap up was over and said goodbye to sauergeek. Quite hungry so rccap and I grabbed a pizza. I headed home soon after and collapsed exhausted into bed as soon as I got there.
Despite my illness, Mystery Hunt once again proved to be a fabulous use of a weekend and I look forward to doing it all over again in January. For those of you who wish to explore a few of the puzzles in more depth, the links to the puzzle websites (as seen by the teams) are below.
The original 30th anniversary Hunt website
The 300th anniversary Hunt website