My Stery Hunt - Details
Jan. 21st, 2008 07:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuTold in the continuous present because otherwise the compound tenses will make my head explode. Although I may slip into the past tense sometimes. Deal. I'm still sleep-deprived.
Thursday night, 10pm: I ask![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
introverte, who's on the computer, to print out Friday's NYT puzzle. "And let me know if it's by Eric or Trip, ok?" I ask her. "Guess what," she replies, "It's by Trip." Cool. Hunt starts early this year. :-) I solve it and email the IIF list to make sure someone brings a copy for the files, just in case. (IIF was the team with which I Hunted.) [NB: I understand that it did, in fact, come into play --- but I don't know where]
Friday, 9am: Drive to work, grab my last few things, and head over to IIF's headquarters rooms to help with setup.
Friday, 11:30am: Head over to Lobby 7 withtahnan for pre-Hunt socializing with members of other teams. On the way there, notice that the infinite corridor has a lot of flyers saying "2 NEW MEMBERS" with an infinity sign over an "I" and, on the bottom, a number-slash-infinity. Just in case, we take notes on the color, number, and location of each sign. (I never found out if they actually meant anything.)
In Lobby 7, Story (Eric) comes rushing through to grab some lunch before the Hunt begins; we shake hands and he tells me that he knows how much I'm looking forward to the Hunt and he hopes I won't be disappointed. Very nice of him. Around 11:50 the place starts filling up. I forget all the folks I said hi to, so please forgive me if I don't include you in this narrative.
thatwesguy came bounding over and gave me a bear hug. Turns out this was his first Hunt, too. I also saw toonhead_npl, lunchboy, and tmcay. I had a lovely conversation with ennirol, but it was a minute before I finally realized that introducing myself by my IRL name was insufficient. Once she realized who I am, I got a hug and some real conversation (instead of general "ready for Hunt?" social niceties).
Some jokesters, probably from CalTech, passed around a putative "Puzzle Zero." It was actually a fun, quick warmup.
The opening ceremony established the premise of the Hunt: The leader of Palindrome (the team running the Hunt this year) was murdered while hiding the coin, and we were going to have to solve the mystery to find it. Fair enough --- let's get to work!
Friday, 12:45 -- back in IIF headquarters, puzzles start coming in. I jointahnan on "Odd One Out", a great puzzle. We were presented with various strings of letters that made no sense. Based on the title and the flavortext, we assumed that these were sentences with either the even or odd letters removed, but we couldn't find a way in. Tah was particularly disturbed by the fact that one string ended with "J" and there are simply not a lot of things that end with "J." I made my first contribution by finally observing that there could still be one more letter after the "J", and Tahnan blurted out, "Oh my god, that's it --- it's Martin Luther King, Jr.!" Except that it wasn't, quite, because in addition to omitting all the even letters they'd also omitted one of the odd letters.
Well, a little bit later, we had "New York Marathon Day" as one sentence, "Jefferson" in another, "Martin Luther King Jr" in another, and "Hermione Granger" in a fourth. And then we realized (I'd like to think we spotted this at the same time :-) that they weren't sentences, they were lists, and therefore between each item it was possible for there to be no omitted letter. And each item had its own omitted odd letter. After that the puzzle fell relatively quickly --- each set's odd letters themselves formed another entry in that same list, with the even letters and one odd letter missing; those odd letters spelled out "Uncle Sam" and we'd solved our first puzzle.
I also got to help a tiny bit on "Police Lineup" by recognizing that "Her shooting of the town's richest man was deemed accidental, though she never said a word in her own defense." clued Maggie Simpson. Spent a bunch of time trying to convert 1s and 0s into letters --- ASCII didn't work, EBCDIC didn't work....
Another puzzle from around this time was "The More the Merrier" which had a Watchmen theme. I made a few suggestions which sounded good at the time but which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
Friday, 3:40pm: It was time to head over to the Hyatt hotel, where Arisia was being held and where I was going to spend Shabbat with my family.
Friday, 6:00pm: We had a lovely Shabbat dinner withmabfan, gnomi, vettecat, sdavido, et al. The food was good, the conversation was lovely, and the singing of zemirot in six-part harmony was wonderful.
Saturday: Started the day at Arisia. Learned to play a game called Zendo; attended a reading by Robert Sawyer. Ran into_opus_ and bearly_here, whom I haven't seen in ages. violetcheetah and michelel72 came by to join introverte and the kids. I got in a good nap.
Saturday, 5:30pm: Shabbat was over and it was time to race back to MIT and continue the Hunt. There were a lot of puzzles solved, a lot sitting around unsolved. One difficulty that I had was that I don't have a laptop, so I was pretty much at the mercy of what other people were solving. I wandered the room, helping with various puzzles here and there. For a while I took on "boards" duty which meant that I was responsible for maintaining the list of puzzles and solutions on the large blackboards.
One puzzle I spent some time helping with was "Twisty Little Passages". Others had done the hard work of going through a complex online maze and plotting out the rooms and their connections, and now we were trying to extract an answer from it. Finally someone started coloring in where the walls would be, which started off sounding like an ok idea but then I became convinced that any sequence of walls could be interpreted as letters. "Yeah, sure, it's an uppercase 'I', and that's an 'F', but there'd have to be that somewhere, don't you think?" Well, about five minutes later all those "you're forcing yourself to find patterns where there aren't any" letters had been finished, and spelled out "PROTECTIVE TARIFF." I was willing to be convinced by that. :-)
Saturday, 11:30pm: A new batch of puzzles came in. Among them was "Pie in the Sky" which I was fortunate enough to grab -- it didn't need a computer. I and two others took it into the next room and attacked it. It basically called for solving a bunch of five-letter clues, then entering the answers in a circular grid which had 24 spaces in the outer ring, then 12, 6, 3, and 1. So you had to enter the letters out of order so that the common letters were shared. This of course made the grid appear to be garbage, except for two things: there were five clues labeled "extras" and the outer ring of garbage contained the words "Rotate one ring" -- and sure enough, if you rotated the ring of 3 the answers to the five extra words appeared radially, along with a sixth word, which we called in as our answer.
Now I have to observe that while I had been really having fun on Friday, my Saturday evening was frustrating because there hadn't been a puzzle that I could sink my teeth into. I was being asked to help out with a bunch of hard puzzles, which was flattering but it meant that I wasn't getting very many "aha" moments -- the easy "ahas" were gone and the hard parts of the puzzles don't yield "ahas" very often by definition. So this very easy puzzle was exactly what I needed at that point to restore my morale and get me pumped up for some more solving.
Midnight Sunday: I ask Tahnan if we could re-form our partnership from Friday. He assented, and I joined him on "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith." A bunch of clues that he'd already mostly solved so far in two groups: a top group with three columns and a bottom group with one. I worked with him on finishing them up, and then we're trying to figure out how to use them. "There's a predominance of Roman-numeral letters in these top answers," I observed, and we did the usual thing: toted them all up as individual symbols, ignoring the usual rules of compositing them. And then we looked at the flavortext, "She'll be fine, in the end. But it's going to take a lot of mysterious operations," and we noticed that the bottom answers were all of the form "consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant," where none of the letters were Roman-numeral-legal. The top grid's rows had been labeled "B, F, G, H, etc." with the letters that were neither vowels nor Roman numerals, so we deduced that A, E, O, and U represented the four basic arithmetic operations and we'd substitute the first B answer for the B in the word where B was the first consonant, the second B answer for the B in the word where B was the second consonant, and so on. And then we'd figure out what assignment of the operations to the vowels would make all the words have the same value, and backsolve the missing word which would be our answer.
Except the math didn't work. Tahnan went off to help someone with another puzzle, and while he was gone I had the "aha" moment that each group of Roman-numeral letters in the top group actually formed a valid Roman numeral -- that is, you'd have sequences like IV or XC but never IC or DIM. So the usual position-independent trick was wrong. I recomputed the numbers, and when Tahnan returned I showed him what I'd done. He then took the "aha" moment one step further and figured out that the AEOU vowels would serve as arithmetic operators just as well in the top words as in the bottom words.
We tried to figure them out deductively, without much success. Finally we decided that this was now a brute-force problem and he would go write a Python script to attack it. Later, once he'd solved it, he pointed out that the title was reminiscent of a mnemonic for the order of operations -- "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" -- of which I had not heard; applying that mapping to "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith" would have given the correct mapping of O as multiplication, U as division, etc.
It was a brilliant puzzle, elegantly assembled.
A few folks were working on "Palimpsest" and I tried to help by borrowing a computer and searching, alas without success, for three answers that were eluding them. The wonderful premise of this puzzle (and it just screamed "Ucaoimhu!") was that each answer was of the form (color) (noun), where the noun was representable by a single rune or Phoenician letter. The clues were accompanied by a grid comprising 100 such letters or runes in various colors. Crossing off the ones that were the correct color and noun to correspond to one of the answers left behind a bunch of runes and two Phoenician letters; reading the runes as letters and the Phoenician letters as their names yielded something like "[RED HEAD] is to Holmes League as [YELLOW EYE] is to..." This was one of several puzzles that ended up getting within millimeters of being solved and then frustrating us for the rest of the Hunt. It turns out that Uc simply wanted "YELLOW-EYED", but we kept trying to analogize "RED HEAD" is to Holmes "League" and we were searching for something to fit "Yellow-eyed ____ (10)." We never realized that we were solving one step too many.
I spent a bit of time as the lead solver on "Write-Offs", and when I was stuck Tahnan and I teamed up again. The premise here was again a bunch of clued words, and you had to notice (which Hugh did) that many of them started with synonyms for "remove". So for example the word "AXIOMS" told you to "ax" the letters "IOMS" from one of the other answers. So half the answers were of that nature, and the other half were such that by matching them with a removal answer you'd be left with a single letter (if you removed all instances of the indicated letters). The flavortext was quite helpful here. We were almost done when I spotted "BANKER ACROSTIC" getting formed by the answer letters, and we had a good laugh at how silly an answer that would be. Fortunately, once we realized that it was in fact correct, Tahnan said "Well, nmHz, you said you wanted BAN to show up in the other answers. If we take the acrostic of the clues we started with and ban 'KER', what do we get?" It turned out that we get "CONSOLIDATION LOAN" which was the correct answer to the puzzle. Cool.
Then I was called in as fresh brains on "Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos," another Ucaoimhu tour de force. This was a narrative in a constructed language. Two of my teammates had performed the amazing task of deducing the linguistic structure and vocabulary and producing an English translation. The story was a murder mystery with characters who were named after Clue characters and whose clothing resembled (terran) nautical signal flags. There were Star Trek references ("Mr. Body was a fan of Star Trek. He was wearing a red shirt, and the galaxy is an eater-of-red-shirts.")
My teammates had, incredibly, gotten through all of this and were now stuck for an idea of where to go next. I asked a bunch of "what if" questions, including "what if you take the letters each character is wearing and list them in the order in which everyone speaks?" My teammates said "we did that" and showed me the result, and I saw that the sequence started with the alien word for "body." What had thrown them was that they said "Gee, that's almost the name of the guy who got killed" which was the alien equivalent of "Boddy" (as in the Clue game) and they dismissed it as one of those coincidences that you see when you're sleep-deprived and desperately looking for hidden messages. We pulled up the lexicon and immediately got "body - color - shape like X," and we investigated the way the alien language handled the construct form and deduced that the translation was actually "body of the color of the X-shape." Once again, we were stuck at this point for the rest of the hunt. We realized that Col. Mustard was the one wearing the X-shape on his shirt, and tried "Colonel Mustard", "Yellow", "Mustard", and "Colonel". There had been some words in Greek so we tried "Xanthos." (Turns out we were very close: "X color-body" going via Greek would have become "X chromosome.")
I was sent to Lobby 7 along with an out-of-town teammate to work on "Radio Waves." We had been given a very simple LC circuit diagram, and he had computed the resulting frequency which was in the middle of the FM band. There were a series of photos showing parts of Lobby 7, so we went down there with a radio. (He wanted someone along with knowledge of MIT in case that turned out to be necessary.) We picked up the word "Needlepoint" at the location indicated by the first picture, then followed the path indicated by the other pictures, which had us looking up toward the skylight and then facing towards the infinite corridor. We thought that maybe "needlepoint" was trying to indicate a compass direction, but had no further insights and so decided to return to base. We tried coming up with all sort of ways to proceed, and came up blank. Yet again, we had the right answer and were looking for one more step that never came: "NEEDLEPOINT" was apparently the answer. (So why all the extra photos? Perhaps we followed the path in reverse, and they were trying to get us to end up at the right outlet?)
I came up with the last sentence of the first step in "Ski Slopes", but was otherwise not involved.
Throughout this time we were working on the "New Jersey Turnpike Meta," another cool puzzle involving recognizing the names of the stops on the NJ Turnpike, noting that the answers associated with the southbound rest stops contained the chemical symbols for the alkali metals and the northbound rest stops the halogens, and taking the letters preceding the symbols and noting that they spelled something. We were hung up for a long time on the idea that the halogens required the letter preceding while the alkali metals would take the letter following the symbol, but (at 7:30am) when we finally solved the puzzle for hydrogen (which corresponds to the Lombardi rest stop, the only rest stop serving both north- and south-bound traffic --- and hydrogen acts as both an alkali metal and halogen) we got "VANQUISH" which put the kibosh on the idea that the metals would use the letter following the element, and we were able to solve "SALT AL'S STREET." I had been hoping the answer would involve salt in some way, because of the chemistry involved. We were then told that to complete the puzzle we had to provide a picture of someone salting a street in New Jersey where someone named Al lives. I tried IM'ing my brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey and is almost always online, but I guess he wasn't up yet.
Sunday 5:30am: Getting a bit frustrated, perhaps I should sleep. Went into the sleeping room, bunched up my coat as a pillow, dozed for 20 minutes, couldn't sleep any more, went back to the solving room.
Sunday 7:00am: We are visited byjedusor (NPL: Hooligan), a member of Palindrome, checking in with us. Once again, a few minutes into the conversation she suddenly realizes who I am and I get a hug. Gee, maybe I should have put 530nm330Hz on my nametag after all. :-)
At this point I was trying to decide whether to head back to the hotel and get some real sleep, or stick it out. Since last year's Hunt had ended early Sunday, I was afraid that I'd get back to the hotel only to get a phone call telling me to come back in 2 hours to strike the rooms. And I was getting my second wind. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Plus, there were more puzzles to do. But it's mostly a blur, since I really should have been asleep.
I spent some time on "Global Coolness" and it seemed clear that the "degrees" were not temperature but angles, and we needed to use them to triangulate from MIT and Harvard in order to sketch out an answer phrase or numbers, but I lacked a computer so couldn't realize my idea. I explained it to someone else who tried but she ran aground and I don't think we finished it.
Jennie was working on "X Marks The Spot" which involved identifying mile markers on the Boston Marathon route from their Google Maps satellite photos. Since I can recognize much of the route from above (it goes near my house and along roads that we frequent) I helped with that; I then suggested that if we take the mile markers as letter indexes (26 miles in a marathon, after all) and simply read them off in the order in which the pictures had been given to us we might find an answer, and sure enough we were able to rattle off FLORIDA KEYS in no time at all. Yay!
I tried to help Tahnan finish off the last two clues in "Bottom Line". Among my many suggestions was one good one -- that "TOON WHO IS / OF MEXICAN / ORIGIN / AND CAN" did not have to be followed by a verb, especially since we couldn't think of a verb that would fill in "F ___ OF NOT MORE THAN" which is what was crossing. Sure enough, the missing element was "INE" and the answer was "REN" (who is a chihuahua -- a breed of Mexican origin, and canine). Alas, we never figured out how to end "COMPANY WHOSE / PRODUCT BROKE / THE SALES / RECORD" crossing "DIRECTION __ TRAIN" so we never finished that puzzle.
Sunday 4:30pm: We're starting to lose steam. Too many "almost-there" puzzles, not enough fresh solving. Palindrome is starting to offer hints, which means that they're also worried that the Hunt is running long. We get the sense that other teams are sufficiently farther along than we are that we're not going to lose anything by making the decision to pick a stopping point early enough to let people get some sleep after cleaning up, so we take a vote and decide that at 10pm we'll be done no matter what.
Sunday 5:30pm: OK, time to go back to the hotel, have some dinner, see my wife and kids. It has gotten bitterly cold and there's a sharp wind. I call Heather while heading back to confirm plans -- she'll gather the kids from their programs and meet me at the hotel for dinner. I got there a little early and dozed for 5 minutes or so. After dinner they went back to Arisia programming and I headed back in to IIF HQ
Sunday 7pm: We're very done. Some people are still solving, but most of us are sitting around joking, post-morteming, fantasizing about how we'd run the Hunt if we won.
Sunday 8:20pm: The solvers get one last answer and call it in.
Sunday 8:30pm: The Bombers have found the coin. It's over. Even though we'd said we'd start cleaning up at 10pm, there's no point in waiting, and we are done and out of there at 9:30. One of the other IIF members is also splitting her time between the Hunt and Arisia and she offers me a ride back to the hotel.
Sunday 10:00pm: What a wonderful three days it's been. Now for a nice, long, shower and some sleep.
Thursday night, 10pm: I ask
introverte, who's on the computer, to print out Friday's NYT puzzle. "And let me know if it's by Eric or Trip, ok?" I ask her. "Guess what," she replies, "It's by Trip." Cool. Hunt starts early this year. :-) I solve it and email the IIF list to make sure someone brings a copy for the files, just in case. (IIF was the team with which I Hunted.) [NB: I understand that it did, in fact, come into play --- but I don't know where]Friday, 9am: Drive to work, grab my last few things, and head over to IIF's headquarters rooms to help with setup.
Friday, 11:30am: Head over to Lobby 7 with
tahnan for pre-Hunt socializing with members of other teams. On the way there, notice that the infinite corridor has a lot of flyers saying "2 NEW MEMBERS" with an infinity sign over an "I" and, on the bottom, a number-slash-infinity. Just in case, we take notes on the color, number, and location of each sign. (I never found out if they actually meant anything.)In Lobby 7, Story (Eric) comes rushing through to grab some lunch before the Hunt begins; we shake hands and he tells me that he knows how much I'm looking forward to the Hunt and he hopes I won't be disappointed. Very nice of him. Around 11:50 the place starts filling up. I forget all the folks I said hi to, so please forgive me if I don't include you in this narrative.
thatwesguy came bounding over and gave me a bear hug. Turns out this was his first Hunt, too. I also saw toonhead_npl, lunchboy, and tmcay. I had a lovely conversation with ennirol, but it was a minute before I finally realized that introducing myself by my IRL name was insufficient. Once she realized who I am, I got a hug and some real conversation (instead of general "ready for Hunt?" social niceties).Some jokesters, probably from CalTech, passed around a putative "Puzzle Zero." It was actually a fun, quick warmup.
The opening ceremony established the premise of the Hunt: The leader of Palindrome (the team running the Hunt this year) was murdered while hiding the coin, and we were going to have to solve the mystery to find it. Fair enough --- let's get to work!
Friday, 12:45 -- back in IIF headquarters, puzzles start coming in. I join
tahnan on "Odd One Out", a great puzzle. We were presented with various strings of letters that made no sense. Based on the title and the flavortext, we assumed that these were sentences with either the even or odd letters removed, but we couldn't find a way in. Tah was particularly disturbed by the fact that one string ended with "J" and there are simply not a lot of things that end with "J." I made my first contribution by finally observing that there could still be one more letter after the "J", and Tahnan blurted out, "Oh my god, that's it --- it's Martin Luther King, Jr.!" Except that it wasn't, quite, because in addition to omitting all the even letters they'd also omitted one of the odd letters.Well, a little bit later, we had "New York Marathon Day" as one sentence, "Jefferson" in another, "Martin Luther King Jr" in another, and "Hermione Granger" in a fourth. And then we realized (I'd like to think we spotted this at the same time :-) that they weren't sentences, they were lists, and therefore between each item it was possible for there to be no omitted letter. And each item had its own omitted odd letter. After that the puzzle fell relatively quickly --- each set's odd letters themselves formed another entry in that same list, with the even letters and one odd letter missing; those odd letters spelled out "Uncle Sam" and we'd solved our first puzzle.
I also got to help a tiny bit on "Police Lineup" by recognizing that "Her shooting of the town's richest man was deemed accidental, though she never said a word in her own defense." clued Maggie Simpson. Spent a bunch of time trying to convert 1s and 0s into letters --- ASCII didn't work, EBCDIC didn't work....
Another puzzle from around this time was "The More the Merrier" which had a Watchmen theme. I made a few suggestions which sounded good at the time but which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
Friday, 3:40pm: It was time to head over to the Hyatt hotel, where Arisia was being held and where I was going to spend Shabbat with my family.
Friday, 6:00pm: We had a lovely Shabbat dinner with
mabfan, gnomi, vettecat, sdavido, et al. The food was good, the conversation was lovely, and the singing of zemirot in six-part harmony was wonderful.Saturday: Started the day at Arisia. Learned to play a game called Zendo; attended a reading by Robert Sawyer. Ran into
_opus_ and bearly_here, whom I haven't seen in ages. violetcheetah and michelel72 came by to join introverte and the kids. I got in a good nap. Saturday, 5:30pm: Shabbat was over and it was time to race back to MIT and continue the Hunt. There were a lot of puzzles solved, a lot sitting around unsolved. One difficulty that I had was that I don't have a laptop, so I was pretty much at the mercy of what other people were solving. I wandered the room, helping with various puzzles here and there. For a while I took on "boards" duty which meant that I was responsible for maintaining the list of puzzles and solutions on the large blackboards.
One puzzle I spent some time helping with was "Twisty Little Passages". Others had done the hard work of going through a complex online maze and plotting out the rooms and their connections, and now we were trying to extract an answer from it. Finally someone started coloring in where the walls would be, which started off sounding like an ok idea but then I became convinced that any sequence of walls could be interpreted as letters. "Yeah, sure, it's an uppercase 'I', and that's an 'F', but there'd have to be that somewhere, don't you think?" Well, about five minutes later all those "you're forcing yourself to find patterns where there aren't any" letters had been finished, and spelled out "PROTECTIVE TARIFF." I was willing to be convinced by that. :-)
Saturday, 11:30pm: A new batch of puzzles came in. Among them was "Pie in the Sky" which I was fortunate enough to grab -- it didn't need a computer. I and two others took it into the next room and attacked it. It basically called for solving a bunch of five-letter clues, then entering the answers in a circular grid which had 24 spaces in the outer ring, then 12, 6, 3, and 1. So you had to enter the letters out of order so that the common letters were shared. This of course made the grid appear to be garbage, except for two things: there were five clues labeled "extras" and the outer ring of garbage contained the words "Rotate one ring" -- and sure enough, if you rotated the ring of 3 the answers to the five extra words appeared radially, along with a sixth word, which we called in as our answer.
Now I have to observe that while I had been really having fun on Friday, my Saturday evening was frustrating because there hadn't been a puzzle that I could sink my teeth into. I was being asked to help out with a bunch of hard puzzles, which was flattering but it meant that I wasn't getting very many "aha" moments -- the easy "ahas" were gone and the hard parts of the puzzles don't yield "ahas" very often by definition. So this very easy puzzle was exactly what I needed at that point to restore my morale and get me pumped up for some more solving.
Midnight Sunday: I ask Tahnan if we could re-form our partnership from Friday. He assented, and I joined him on "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith." A bunch of clues that he'd already mostly solved so far in two groups: a top group with three columns and a bottom group with one. I worked with him on finishing them up, and then we're trying to figure out how to use them. "There's a predominance of Roman-numeral letters in these top answers," I observed, and we did the usual thing: toted them all up as individual symbols, ignoring the usual rules of compositing them. And then we looked at the flavortext, "She'll be fine, in the end. But it's going to take a lot of mysterious operations," and we noticed that the bottom answers were all of the form "consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel-consonant," where none of the letters were Roman-numeral-legal. The top grid's rows had been labeled "B, F, G, H, etc." with the letters that were neither vowels nor Roman numerals, so we deduced that A, E, O, and U represented the four basic arithmetic operations and we'd substitute the first B answer for the B in the word where B was the first consonant, the second B answer for the B in the word where B was the second consonant, and so on. And then we'd figure out what assignment of the operations to the vowels would make all the words have the same value, and backsolve the missing word which would be our answer.
Except the math didn't work. Tahnan went off to help someone with another puzzle, and while he was gone I had the "aha" moment that each group of Roman-numeral letters in the top group actually formed a valid Roman numeral -- that is, you'd have sequences like IV or XC but never IC or DIM. So the usual position-independent trick was wrong. I recomputed the numbers, and when Tahnan returned I showed him what I'd done. He then took the "aha" moment one step further and figured out that the AEOU vowels would serve as arithmetic operators just as well in the top words as in the bottom words.
We tried to figure them out deductively, without much success. Finally we decided that this was now a brute-force problem and he would go write a Python script to attack it. Later, once he'd solved it, he pointed out that the title was reminiscent of a mnemonic for the order of operations -- "Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally" -- of which I had not heard; applying that mapping to "Our Unfortunate Aunt Edith" would have given the correct mapping of O as multiplication, U as division, etc.
It was a brilliant puzzle, elegantly assembled.
A few folks were working on "Palimpsest" and I tried to help by borrowing a computer and searching, alas without success, for three answers that were eluding them. The wonderful premise of this puzzle (and it just screamed "Ucaoimhu!") was that each answer was of the form (color) (noun), where the noun was representable by a single rune or Phoenician letter. The clues were accompanied by a grid comprising 100 such letters or runes in various colors. Crossing off the ones that were the correct color and noun to correspond to one of the answers left behind a bunch of runes and two Phoenician letters; reading the runes as letters and the Phoenician letters as their names yielded something like "[RED HEAD] is to Holmes League as [YELLOW EYE] is to..." This was one of several puzzles that ended up getting within millimeters of being solved and then frustrating us for the rest of the Hunt. It turns out that Uc simply wanted "YELLOW-EYED", but we kept trying to analogize "RED HEAD" is to Holmes "League" and we were searching for something to fit "Yellow-eyed ____ (10)." We never realized that we were solving one step too many.
I spent a bit of time as the lead solver on "Write-Offs", and when I was stuck Tahnan and I teamed up again. The premise here was again a bunch of clued words, and you had to notice (which Hugh did) that many of them started with synonyms for "remove". So for example the word "AXIOMS" told you to "ax" the letters "IOMS" from one of the other answers. So half the answers were of that nature, and the other half were such that by matching them with a removal answer you'd be left with a single letter (if you removed all instances of the indicated letters). The flavortext was quite helpful here. We were almost done when I spotted "BANKER ACROSTIC" getting formed by the answer letters, and we had a good laugh at how silly an answer that would be. Fortunately, once we realized that it was in fact correct, Tahnan said "Well, nmHz, you said you wanted BAN to show up in the other answers. If we take the acrostic of the clues we started with and ban 'KER', what do we get?" It turned out that we get "CONSOLIDATION LOAN" which was the correct answer to the puzzle. Cool.
Then I was called in as fresh brains on "Son of the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos," another Ucaoimhu tour de force. This was a narrative in a constructed language. Two of my teammates had performed the amazing task of deducing the linguistic structure and vocabulary and producing an English translation. The story was a murder mystery with characters who were named after Clue characters and whose clothing resembled (terran) nautical signal flags. There were Star Trek references ("Mr. Body was a fan of Star Trek. He was wearing a red shirt, and the galaxy is an eater-of-red-shirts.")
My teammates had, incredibly, gotten through all of this and were now stuck for an idea of where to go next. I asked a bunch of "what if" questions, including "what if you take the letters each character is wearing and list them in the order in which everyone speaks?" My teammates said "we did that" and showed me the result, and I saw that the sequence started with the alien word for "body." What had thrown them was that they said "Gee, that's almost the name of the guy who got killed" which was the alien equivalent of "Boddy" (as in the Clue game) and they dismissed it as one of those coincidences that you see when you're sleep-deprived and desperately looking for hidden messages. We pulled up the lexicon and immediately got "body - color - shape like X," and we investigated the way the alien language handled the construct form and deduced that the translation was actually "body of the color of the X-shape." Once again, we were stuck at this point for the rest of the hunt. We realized that Col. Mustard was the one wearing the X-shape on his shirt, and tried "Colonel Mustard", "Yellow", "Mustard", and "Colonel". There had been some words in Greek so we tried "Xanthos." (Turns out we were very close: "X color-body" going via Greek would have become "X chromosome.")
I was sent to Lobby 7 along with an out-of-town teammate to work on "Radio Waves." We had been given a very simple LC circuit diagram, and he had computed the resulting frequency which was in the middle of the FM band. There were a series of photos showing parts of Lobby 7, so we went down there with a radio. (He wanted someone along with knowledge of MIT in case that turned out to be necessary.) We picked up the word "Needlepoint" at the location indicated by the first picture, then followed the path indicated by the other pictures, which had us looking up toward the skylight and then facing towards the infinite corridor. We thought that maybe "needlepoint" was trying to indicate a compass direction, but had no further insights and so decided to return to base. We tried coming up with all sort of ways to proceed, and came up blank. Yet again, we had the right answer and were looking for one more step that never came: "NEEDLEPOINT" was apparently the answer. (So why all the extra photos? Perhaps we followed the path in reverse, and they were trying to get us to end up at the right outlet?)
I came up with the last sentence of the first step in "Ski Slopes", but was otherwise not involved.
Throughout this time we were working on the "New Jersey Turnpike Meta," another cool puzzle involving recognizing the names of the stops on the NJ Turnpike, noting that the answers associated with the southbound rest stops contained the chemical symbols for the alkali metals and the northbound rest stops the halogens, and taking the letters preceding the symbols and noting that they spelled something. We were hung up for a long time on the idea that the halogens required the letter preceding while the alkali metals would take the letter following the symbol, but (at 7:30am) when we finally solved the puzzle for hydrogen (which corresponds to the Lombardi rest stop, the only rest stop serving both north- and south-bound traffic --- and hydrogen acts as both an alkali metal and halogen) we got "VANQUISH" which put the kibosh on the idea that the metals would use the letter following the element, and we were able to solve "SALT AL'S STREET." I had been hoping the answer would involve salt in some way, because of the chemistry involved. We were then told that to complete the puzzle we had to provide a picture of someone salting a street in New Jersey where someone named Al lives. I tried IM'ing my brother-in-law, who lives in New Jersey and is almost always online, but I guess he wasn't up yet.
Sunday 5:30am: Getting a bit frustrated, perhaps I should sleep. Went into the sleeping room, bunched up my coat as a pillow, dozed for 20 minutes, couldn't sleep any more, went back to the solving room.
Sunday 7:00am: We are visited by
jedusor (NPL: Hooligan), a member of Palindrome, checking in with us. Once again, a few minutes into the conversation she suddenly realizes who I am and I get a hug. Gee, maybe I should have put 530nm330Hz on my nametag after all. :-)At this point I was trying to decide whether to head back to the hotel and get some real sleep, or stick it out. Since last year's Hunt had ended early Sunday, I was afraid that I'd get back to the hotel only to get a phone call telling me to come back in 2 hours to strike the rooms. And I was getting my second wind. So I stayed. And stayed. And stayed. Plus, there were more puzzles to do. But it's mostly a blur, since I really should have been asleep.
I spent some time on "Global Coolness" and it seemed clear that the "degrees" were not temperature but angles, and we needed to use them to triangulate from MIT and Harvard in order to sketch out an answer phrase or numbers, but I lacked a computer so couldn't realize my idea. I explained it to someone else who tried but she ran aground and I don't think we finished it.
Jennie was working on "X Marks The Spot" which involved identifying mile markers on the Boston Marathon route from their Google Maps satellite photos. Since I can recognize much of the route from above (it goes near my house and along roads that we frequent) I helped with that; I then suggested that if we take the mile markers as letter indexes (26 miles in a marathon, after all) and simply read them off in the order in which the pictures had been given to us we might find an answer, and sure enough we were able to rattle off FLORIDA KEYS in no time at all. Yay!
I tried to help Tahnan finish off the last two clues in "Bottom Line". Among my many suggestions was one good one -- that "TOON WHO IS / OF MEXICAN / ORIGIN / AND CAN" did not have to be followed by a verb, especially since we couldn't think of a verb that would fill in "F ___ OF NOT MORE THAN" which is what was crossing. Sure enough, the missing element was "INE" and the answer was "REN" (who is a chihuahua -- a breed of Mexican origin, and canine). Alas, we never figured out how to end "COMPANY WHOSE / PRODUCT BROKE / THE SALES / RECORD" crossing "DIRECTION __ TRAIN" so we never finished that puzzle.
Sunday 4:30pm: We're starting to lose steam. Too many "almost-there" puzzles, not enough fresh solving. Palindrome is starting to offer hints, which means that they're also worried that the Hunt is running long. We get the sense that other teams are sufficiently farther along than we are that we're not going to lose anything by making the decision to pick a stopping point early enough to let people get some sleep after cleaning up, so we take a vote and decide that at 10pm we'll be done no matter what.
Sunday 5:30pm: OK, time to go back to the hotel, have some dinner, see my wife and kids. It has gotten bitterly cold and there's a sharp wind. I call Heather while heading back to confirm plans -- she'll gather the kids from their programs and meet me at the hotel for dinner. I got there a little early and dozed for 5 minutes or so. After dinner they went back to Arisia programming and I headed back in to IIF HQ
Sunday 7pm: We're very done. Some people are still solving, but most of us are sitting around joking, post-morteming, fantasizing about how we'd run the Hunt if we won.
Sunday 8:20pm: The solvers get one last answer and call it in.
Sunday 8:30pm: The Bombers have found the coin. It's over. Even though we'd said we'd start cleaning up at 10pm, there's no point in waiting, and we are done and out of there at 9:30. One of the other IIF members is also splitting her time between the Hunt and Arisia and she offers me a ride back to the hotel.
Sunday 10:00pm: What a wonderful three days it's been. Now for a nice, long, shower and some sleep.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 06:06 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 06:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 04:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 04:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 06:54 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-22 09:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-24 06:17 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-24 02:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-25 01:15 am (UTC)In X2, after running the described operations once on the phrase "2008MITMYSTERYHUNT", you get "011808NYT16A61A30D". When you put together the associated answers, you get "do it again / start with / timeshare". And so you do it again, starting with "TIMESHARE".
Also, I have to say that finding a Hunt writer as the author of a crossword puzzle and knowing it would be in the hunt? Brilliant, but how on earth did you know to do that? XD
(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-25 04:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2008-01-28 06:17 pm (UTC)I see that your approach was to completely avoid Hunting over Shabbat, but I think that would be too frustrating for me, especially this year when I took on a lot of leadership functions for my team.
So thanks for posting and showing an alternate approach to the problem.
(no subject)
Date: 2008-07-13 10:39 am (UTC)