Comments | okosut: 0 mod 5

okosut

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Jan 20, 2010 14:23

In November, Metaphysical Plant (my mystery hunt team) had a puzzle party. I happened to be in Boston at the time, so I went. I showed up too late to solve any puzzles (they'd done the P&A, I think), but we ended up hanging out for another two or three hours, had dinner, and chatted about team organization and such. I continue to believe that ( Read more... )

Comments 29

davidglasser January 20 2010, 19:53:29 UTC

Well, Side by Side by Side is a Sondheim reference...

okosut January 20 2010, 20:12:19 UTC

Oh, okay. That makes sense then.

beinsane January 20 2010, 20:13:27 UTC

Manic Sages (2nd place) here. We had the clever idea on TYP to start with the easier (fewer rules) categories and got "Remains of the Day" quickly...which completely screwed us in the endgame when we didn't have a list of Best Picture winners. So while you were off finding the coin, we were still calling in ROBOT FIGHTER and ROBOT FILCHER and...

dr_whom January 20 2010, 20:29:42 UTC

Actually, we (Plant) never did eliminate all error in our list of revised Best-Picture winners in endgame: we extracted the letters ROBOT FILM MAE, figured "that doesn't sound right", and guessed and called in ROBOT FILM DVD instead.

timeslayer January 21 2010, 01:02:25 UTC

we didn't just guess robot film dvd; molly, lanya, and i went through and found the correct ones for the last part and got the d and v, and i'm pretty sure we confirmed the last d too, though we might have called in the guess at that point.

dr_whom January 21 2010, 01:15:21 UTC

Oh, I totally didn't realize that! (I was in the other room at the time.) I'm sorry for giving the wrong impression in my comment above.

Thread 5

lokiect January 20 2010, 20:19:56 UTC

my team is pretty excited about the hunt you guys are going to run. spies was my first hunt, but even the people who'd been doing it for a while put it as one of their favorites ;9

okosut January 20 2010, 20:35:21 UTC

Yay pressure! A couple of us were talking about how when we won the first time, some people expected a repeat of Time Bandits, which was a hunt written by a large team of mostly undergrads and turned out not so good, and we were a large team of mostly undergrads. I think a lot of our motivation the first time around was that we wanted to prove wrong anyone who was thinking that. Now we may have the opposite problem, that expectations are too high.

In any case, I'm glad you liked our last hunt. I hope you like our next one.

lokiect January 20 2010, 21:13:26 UTC

sorry? Run an adequate hunt? rah rah?

honestly, going from my impression of the people I know on your team, I'd expect you to push yourselves to run a good hunt far more than any of us on the outside could. just try not to die (or get incompletes ;9 ) in the process?

okosut January 20 2010, 21:18:48 UTC

No worries. Yeah, an adequate hunt! Nobody will be expecting that!

Yeah, at our team dinner on Sunday, everyone was looking around saying "well darn, looks like we all have unpaid part-time jobs for the next year." At least for me, I'm going to be much busy this year (graduating + probable post-doc + applying for faculty jobs) than I was in 2005 (M.Eng student + TAing + slacking off my first semester at Cornell), so I probably shouldn't spent too much time on hunt. Which isn't to say I won't.

vfish January 20 2010, 20:38:10 UTC

Ian was amazing on the metas, but I can confirm that there was one that we managed to solve without him.

Reid and I co-solved the 1926/Hollywood meta. With only about 4 or 5 answers in the round, I noticed that each answer had exactly the same number of letters as the associated robot, and that each robot-answer pair had exactly four letters in common. Throwing in a partial backsolve of Mystery Hunt Puzzle 3000 (which I was able to fully backsolve immediately after we got the meta) was enough for Reid to figure out to lay out the letters in overlapping 2-by-2 blocks as blinked out by the red lights when you hovered over a puzzle name on the round page. Reid then managed to backsolve one of the puzzles (maybe it was Need to Take Someone Out?), but the other two unsolved puzzles had too many possibilities to be able to make educated guesses at the time.

vfish January 20 2010, 20:42:51 UTC

Answer extraction on 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea: The battleships spell out IWAS BARN EYMI LLER, which clues HAL LINDEN.

okosut January 20 2010, 20:46:26 UTC

Right. Jane told me about that at wrap-up. Seems totally reasonable. And, I gather, we figured out not to long after I had to leave for the talent show.