Too Big to Solve?

[motris]

Not my tagline, but a good description for the Mystery Hunt that just happened. One line of dialogue after last year's Hunt that I led with in my wrap-up was a question of when is too soon for a Hunt to end. I said, in this era of a few competitive teams trying to grow to get over the winning hurdle, constructors aiming bigger was a mistake. The

Comments

Flavortext (Lack of)

[anonymous]

Looking at the intended solutions is a bit frustrating. Some seem like decent puzzles, but with no indication that the solver should be pursuing the intended method. Take Linked Pairs:

Puzzle:

http://www.coinheist.com/sneakers/linked_pairs/index.html

Solution:

http://z.manicsages.org/puzzle/uploads/puzzle_files/50f97ae1d6438.zip_dir/

The actual puzzle is fine, but was there a reason the solver should have known that the puzzles were in different languages? Was Hofstadter supposed to be a nudge in this direction? Some decent flavor text hinting really would have helped here.

- JJ

Re: Flavortext (Lack of)

[anonymous]

Seeing now that one of the English clues mentions Japanese and one of the Japanese clues mentions English.

That was a bit subtle for me.

- JJ

Re: Flavortext (Lack of)

[anonymous]

Some of the clues such as "You murder" and "We chowed down" are worded oddly, but would make a lot of sense if interpreted as cluing conjugations. This was enough for our testsolvers to attempt to fill in the crosswords in different languages.

To determine which languages each crossword should be filled in, each set of clues mentions the language of the other fill in its pair (e.g. the French clues had the word "Spanish" in it and vice versa).

-Herman

Why partials are sometimes needed

[toddetter]

It was mentioned earlier about confirming partials, and while I understand that the MIT hunt traditionally hasn't done this, I think constructors need to realize the pitfalls of not having it

Re: Why partials are sometimes needed

[motris]

As I wrote elsewhere, when I was called in to kill Ex Post Facto dead, I had Tyler do the "so what if we just write in half the grid step" and that still took many minutes to find and read out the answer. If it weren't for the awesome almost perfect symmetry of the half grid I would have discounted such an odd step.

And of course, I was more interested in knowing how "INTERPOSE" could work in the puzzle as the next step, since in this Hunt it clearly could not be the final answer and my Pavlovian response was to interpose something but I wasn't sure what. *sigh*

ztbb

[ztbb]

Yes, this is a great example of one of the many places where an editor should have stepped in and said "no". The puzzle up through the step of re-filling the grid and reading the single letters is a beautiful, novel idea. The last step -- whether or not it was properly clued -- only serves to prolong and detract from the solving experience.

Re: ztbb

[cananian]

I'll mention 50/50 as another puzzle with an interesting idea that contains three or four too many ahas... leading to a bitmap picture which only ambiguously clues the desired answer word. This would be a much better puzzle with the core statistics idea intact and a streamlined extraction once you had figured out the "groups of 1729" aha.

[zotmeister]

motris.livejournal.com - THE premier website for bitching about poorly-run puzzle competitions.

[motris]

I'm glad I own that brand. It means I can now build my own brand of good competitions at Grandmaster Puzzles and use the motris.livejournal.com brand to trash all competitors! Until now its never been undeserved and I don't intend to change that.

Again, individually, I think these were ambitious and often cool puzzles. But too often too hard or underclued, with poor end extraction phrases, and in a big picture sense the Hunt was extremely broken from first impossible event to last impossible meta. When I get the sub-note about the KenKen puzzle, for example, that "I have a Ph.D. in mathematics and I'm not sure I could have gotten this to the end", you are more writing a Hunt for the whole world to try to crack and might as well throw Cryptos or P=NP or something else into the rounds to just pad the length a bit.

[motris]

When a logic puzzle is too large for me to bother to solve it (the 50x50 crypto PbN), that might be a problem. But maybe I shouldn't talk as that was a clear software puzzle. And I did use software to assist Color Sudoku just because I have great tools. We had two other people on paper there.

Poor kids

[cananian]

I'm actually starting to feel rather sorry for the puzzle writers on Sages. Their puzzles are being maligned because of decisions made by their editors. There are always overly complex and/or not-quite-baked puzzle ideas, but successful hunts have fantastic editors that make all the puzzles shine. Instead some poor kid writing his first puzzle for Sages wasn't given the necessary guidance, direction, or aesthetic sense, and now the Internetz are calling their hunt the worst thing ever. :(

There were some nice puzzle ideas in the Sages hunt. Just to pick two, 50/50 and "diagramless crossmusic" are both interesting innovative ideas buried by terrible editing.

Re: Poor kids

[noahspuzzlelj]

So true, when I think back to my first few puzzle suggestions back in 2006 before the editors got ahold of them... There were certainly a lot of cool ideas in the puzzles I saw, enough to make an excellent hunt.

Re: Poor kids

[motris]

Indeed. The constructors are mostly blameless here. For first time Hunt writers, they had brilliant ambitious ideas and naturally took them to extremes. That my blog site became a flame war is something I'd like to temper as best I can. But editors and testers need to give the honest feedback to turn the ideas into functioning puzzles.

My biggest issue with this Hunt by far though is the apparent philosophical decision that metas need nearly all answers. Combatting back solving is not a good goal if it makes your Hunt unfinishable. This meta goal cannot work with puzzles of high difficulty.

Re: Poor kids

[cananian]

I would argue simply that "combatting back solving is not a good goal".

[cananian]

Post-mortem from the Sages' art director: http://littlegreenriver.com/weblog/2013/01/24/mystery-hunt-post-mortem-the-hunt-we-wanted-and-the-hunt-we-had/

[codeman38]

One thing I found interesting in that post is that one team called in "SOL" for Ex Post Facto-- which is a completely reasonable thing to do, given the clue "problem half solved"!

If there's one thing that I feel ruined this hunt for me, it would have to be the ambiguity in what to do with a given extracted phrase. Sometimes something that looked like an oblique clue was the actual answer; other times, what looked like a final answer was actually a further clue. And sometimes, misinterpreting an extracted phrase led people down the wrong path entirely for the second aha (as happened to me on a few puzzles).

[motris]

The phrase was PROB CLEARLY DEFINED which almost clues a quote save for the Missing LEM of PROBLEM HALF SOLVED which is an obfuscated step towards the actually thing. SOL is a valid jump there from the way PROB was used. I wouldn't have called it in, but I don't fault my frustrated teammate for trying.

[dougo]

I called in SOL as our first answer (for Central Services), followed immediately by HALFSOLVED. They seemed clunky but not unreasonable, and I couldn't bear the obvious alternative interpretation (that we were still only half done!). Oddly enough, lunchboy did actually go through the motions of filling in the grid for the first half of the answers, but we had missed a couple so he went one or two too far, enough to obscure the message and make us conclude that it was a dead end. Later, when the hint came that confirmed that this was in fact what we should do, I noticed that the unclued letters spelled out PRO at the halfway point, so I called that in. Fortunately another teammate found the right answer about thirty seconds later.