Mystery Hunt Wrapup
Jan. 20th, 2009 08:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuSo, yeah, there was this Hunt. It was really cool. Best part: I spent the weekend doing cool stuff with the awesome people from Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening. It was also delightful getting a few moments with my awesome NPL friends on other teams. Too brief, alas, and many of you were gone before wrapup. I hope we'll make it to Baltimore this summer and get to socialize under a little less pressure.
Overall, I had a great time. The theme was fun; the opening skit was very funny. There were some amazing puzzles, and once again I felt like I was a useful contributor to the team effort. I have a few issues, which I'll save for the end of the post, because there were so many things that were wonderful and I want to lead with them. :-)
When zyzzl.com is back up, I'll add links to these puzzles.
I started with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
tahnan and Chris Cotton working on pluHarmony. It was a fun puzzle, just about right for the first round. The idea of matching company name halves was cool. Unfortunately, we got too hung up on the letters part of the grid-based answer, and since they were in the range of musical notes and the title of the puzzle was pluHarmony, we got overly fixated on that possibility. Fortunately, other teammates realized the card-overlay trick that was necessary to complete the puzzle.
I helped out a bit with Corporate Overlords, and then it was time for me to go to the Arisia hotel for Shabbat. The last thing I contributed before I left was a note in our team wiki that the current round was called "Pluto" and had eight puzzles, so there might be a connection between those eight answers and the remaining planets in our Solar System. (Yeah, I know, it's obvious.)
When I got back Saturday evening, much progress had been made. This, for me, is the hardest part: I am completely lacking in the previous 26 hours of hunt history, and it takes a while to get caught up. I also have had no contact with any of the puzzles that were unlocked and solved during that time. Oh, well.
Soon after my return we got access to "Let's Play Spaceball" which I grabbed and worked on with my teammate Karen, and laterjadelennox joined us. This was an elegant little work, and our miniteam made straightforward progress through it. There were 18 "half-innings" in which there was a baseball diamond with clues for the pitch, each of the four bases, and each of the four base paths. The gimmick was that each pitch clued a three-letter word; that trigram was the start of the answer for each of the bases; the answers for each of the base paths could be transformed into the answer for the adjacent base by dropping one letter, anagramming the rest, and affxing the pitch trigram to the front. The four dropped letters went into the "scoreboard" for that inning --- except that, of course, the innings themselves had been given unlabelled and out of order. Writing them on Post-it notes and rearranging gave us our final clue and answer.
The next puzzle that I did a lot on was Aliotherapy. Two others were staring at it and asked me for "fresh eyes". I spotted that "daisy" (a picture of the flower) and "Luke" (a picture of Skywalker) implied "Bo" (as in the third member of the Duke family), and that Oklahoma was between Texas and Kansas, and that gave "Book". I also pointed out that the string C*V*II had to mean "M", and I recognized the WristStrong bracelet. Unfortunately, I went astray at that point and got hung up on "hand" as being between the wrist and the fingers, and so we had "handbook" with an extra "S". Finally, someone pointed out that the fingers are part of the hand, and that should have been "palm", and then I realized where the "S" should go and got "psalmbook".
I then started staring at Megrez Expedition. And staring. And staring.
"Space Madness" came in, and I volunteered to use ImageMagick to extract the 13 relevant frames from the animated gif. I didn't really look at the clues, so I don't know if I would have had the insight about using the extra words to form Wonderfalls episode titles.
I have to say that the structure of the Doctor Who round was brilliant. For those who weren't there: There were eight puzzles with titles like "The Condescending Man Holding a Brightly Colored Parasol", and another eight with titles like "His Investigative Journalist." The puzzles themselves had nothing to do with the Doctor Who TV show, but you had to know how to pair them up, since (1) the Doctor puzzles couldn't be solved without information garnered from the corresponding Companion puzzle, and (2) the answers to the Doctor and Companion puzzles had to be concatenated to get the complete clue for the final answer word. And you also needed to know the number of each Doctor incarnation so you could click the correct "Submit answer" button; this was also the ordering mechanism for the answers.
After the first eight Doctor puzzles was a gap, and a pair of puzzles for The Buzz-Cut Man in a Leather Jacket and His Shopgirl. These were to provide information for the Meta; the fact that they were from the new series was elegant. (And the tenth Doctor and his Medical Intern? They provided the flavortext.)
Zarf, who was sitting next to me, had started working on His Shopgirl, and I was looking at Buzz Cut, and so we decided to pool resources once we realized that the puzzles were actually one doublet. His Shopgirl was fun --- there was a list of forty alien races from Doctor Who, and forty wordplay clues that identified them. The initial letters of the answers spelled out an indication that we had to look up Schwartzchild Wormholes on Wikipedia, and there were highlighted letters that spelled out instructions to start on the Oort Cloud, which we immediately located on the inner board of the "Escape from Zyzzlvaria" board game.
We then debated what grid to use for solving BuzzCut. We decided to just list answers at first, and see what their natural shape would be. Each row was the same number of letters long, so that was fine, but we didn't make the obvious leap at that point. We set it aside for later.
I wastahnan's Googlemonkey for His Gentlemanly Scotsman, and then we worked together on The Rumpled Man with a Bowl Cut to get that answer. The Rumpled Man looked like it would require knowledge about a bunch of card games (such as Guillotine), but it really only needed identifying which game the cards were from; while some of the questions would have needed knowledge of the games had those questions been relevant, in each case one of the other questions was actually the one that needed answering. It reminded me that I need to do a better job of appreciating puzzles that have a certain intimidation factor but which turn out to be solvable anyway.
Tah and I returned to BuzzCut. We filled in a bunch more answers, and he noticed that the second row's "cANDICEBERGEN/Dalai..." was echoed by the penultimate line's "...ferdinAND/ICEBERG/ENds". We fixed a bunch of wrong answers and got a lovely pair of triangles, linked in the middle by a line segment. I went back to the instructions, which said we'd need to make each answer bend once or twice, and I saw that one of our teammates had observed that the diagram of the Schwartzchild Wormhole was topologically a 15x31 cylinder, and I tried to work out a way to make those work together. But I started at the top, when I should have started at the bottom, and we got stalled.
And I went back to staring at Megrez Expedition. And staring. And staring.
By this point it was daytime again. I wandered around the room, helping out here and there with various puzzles, picking up some that had been abandoned and not getting very far on them, standing at the blackboard toying with the metas. I also worked some more on the answers to BuzzCut, getting them a bit more accurate with each pass.
I got to work withbookishfellow and Dado on Nesting Instinct. It was fun, and Codex really impressed me with the speed with which he disposed of that puzzle.
Early Sunday afternoon,cnoocy asked me to explain how far we'd gotten on BuzzCut. I explained it to him, and he suggested that we try transforming the grid into the wormhole picture by working from the bottom. I copied the grid into Emacs and used some keyboard macros to effect the transformation. And OH MY GOD THE WHOLE THING IS SYMMETRICAL. What an amazing work of construction. We were so impressed that instead of simply taking the answer phrase and running with it, we spent another twenty minutes fixing our incorrect answers so we could bask in the brilliant perfection of it. Finally, we read off the middle line: "On Interior Board." Well, duh, we'd already figured that out from the fact that we had an eight-by-eight grid of answer words and the partial instruction to start on the Oort Cloud.
So my hat is off to the constructor of this puzzle, it was a masterful work and a lot of fun to solve, but it was slightly disappointing that after about four hours of work (just on my own part, about fifteen person-hours in all), we got an answer phrase that didn't actually give our team anything --- no dollarbucks, no chance to call in a puzzle for credit, and no additional information.
Finally,saxikath was looking at Megrez, and I and a few other people were sitting around talking about it. We were discussing what an odd word "Tenebra" is. Suddenly, nearly twenty hours after I had first seen this puzzle, and after hours and hours of staring at it, I had that moment. The moment when I suddenly understood how it worked, and there was not a shred of doubt in my mind, and I had the pride of knowing I was the one who was going to crack this one open for the team. And in a voice full of conviction, I proclaimed:
"Nebraska!"
And then we quickly solved the puzzle. All the words with arrows were substrings of the names of cities and their states ("Tenebra" was "La Platte, Nebraska".) My favorite was "Reno, Nevada" which was "NONE" in a double-headed arrow. Reading the initial letters of the cities thus clued gave us instructions on how to derive our final answer.
We felt pretty good about our progress; while we were stuck on some puzzles we kept making slow but steady progress, which was good for morale, and based on the demeanor of the visitors from Hunt HQ we got the feeling that we were still in the running. Around 10:30pm I decided I should probably get some sleep, and I went back to the hotel, leaving instructions that I was to be called if we actually were going to do the runaround.
At 5:00 I woke up, went back to our HQ (because we had agreed to strike the room at 6am) and learned that Beginner's Luck had found the coin at 3:10am. Congratulations, guys!
Overall, I'm quite pleased with how our team did. First of all, we had a lot of fun. No one seemed ready to kill, maim, or even insult anyone else (well, except for you two --- you know who you are, and I think you do it for fun), and when you figure that we were working together under a lot of stress and very little sleep for about 90 hours straight, that's saying a lot. We enjoyed the puzzles, we enjoyed the process of solving the puzzles, and we had a lot of laughs. And we solved a lot of puzzles; our solve rate seemed pretty high (we just got blocked on too many metas) and our wrong-guess rate was gratifyingly low.
I think there were some great innovations this year. The use of "dollarbucks" to open up new rounds was a good way to avoid bottlenecks. The "dollarbucks" system was also a nice way to help equalize the large team/small team stuff. And although the heart of the Hunt was during the time I was away, I think the idea of having a small Hunt that even the smaller and less experienced teams would have a chance to complete is a good one.
I think the problem with this year's Hunt was the Bill Clinton Convention Speech flaw. Remember the speech that was so long that its biggest applause line was "And in conclusion...."? Listening to some of the explanations at the wrapup felt the same way. There were too many instances (the Wheel of Death Meta, for example) where you had to have more than the usual two or three "aha" moments to break through. In my limited experience, the redundant nature of most metas, say, means that if your team simply can't break through on one puzzle, you still have a decent shot at solving the meta without it. In my opinion, there were too many critical junctures in this Hunt, too many places where failure to get one aspect of one puzzle would stop a team dead in its tracks. I think that's why the Hunt lasted as long as it did.
So that's my one gripe. The Bombers did an amazing job of entertaining and challenging us, and once again I say "kudos" and "thank you." I have high hopes for next year's Hunt by Beginner's Luck (or whatever you call yourselves next year), and once again I say "congratulations" and "well done." I am grateful to my teammates on II&F for once again inviting me to solve with y'all and providing just the right balance of "We want to win, but not at the expense of having fun," and once again I say "thank you" and "wait 'til next year!"
Overall, I had a great time. The theme was fun; the opening skit was very funny. There were some amazing puzzles, and once again I felt like I was a useful contributor to the team effort. I have a few issues, which I'll save for the end of the post, because there were so many things that were wonderful and I want to lead with them. :-)
When zyzzl.com is back up, I'll add links to these puzzles.
I started with
tahnan and Chris Cotton working on pluHarmony. It was a fun puzzle, just about right for the first round. The idea of matching company name halves was cool. Unfortunately, we got too hung up on the letters part of the grid-based answer, and since they were in the range of musical notes and the title of the puzzle was pluHarmony, we got overly fixated on that possibility. Fortunately, other teammates realized the card-overlay trick that was necessary to complete the puzzle.I helped out a bit with Corporate Overlords, and then it was time for me to go to the Arisia hotel for Shabbat. The last thing I contributed before I left was a note in our team wiki that the current round was called "Pluto" and had eight puzzles, so there might be a connection between those eight answers and the remaining planets in our Solar System. (Yeah, I know, it's obvious.)
When I got back Saturday evening, much progress had been made. This, for me, is the hardest part: I am completely lacking in the previous 26 hours of hunt history, and it takes a while to get caught up. I also have had no contact with any of the puzzles that were unlocked and solved during that time. Oh, well.
Soon after my return we got access to "Let's Play Spaceball" which I grabbed and worked on with my teammate Karen, and later
jadelennox joined us. This was an elegant little work, and our miniteam made straightforward progress through it. There were 18 "half-innings" in which there was a baseball diamond with clues for the pitch, each of the four bases, and each of the four base paths. The gimmick was that each pitch clued a three-letter word; that trigram was the start of the answer for each of the bases; the answers for each of the base paths could be transformed into the answer for the adjacent base by dropping one letter, anagramming the rest, and affxing the pitch trigram to the front. The four dropped letters went into the "scoreboard" for that inning --- except that, of course, the innings themselves had been given unlabelled and out of order. Writing them on Post-it notes and rearranging gave us our final clue and answer.The next puzzle that I did a lot on was Aliotherapy. Two others were staring at it and asked me for "fresh eyes". I spotted that "daisy" (a picture of the flower) and "Luke" (a picture of Skywalker) implied "Bo" (as in the third member of the Duke family), and that Oklahoma was between Texas and Kansas, and that gave "Book". I also pointed out that the string C*V*II had to mean "M", and I recognized the WristStrong bracelet. Unfortunately, I went astray at that point and got hung up on "hand" as being between the wrist and the fingers, and so we had "handbook" with an extra "S". Finally, someone pointed out that the fingers are part of the hand, and that should have been "palm", and then I realized where the "S" should go and got "psalmbook".
I then started staring at Megrez Expedition. And staring. And staring.
"Space Madness" came in, and I volunteered to use ImageMagick to extract the 13 relevant frames from the animated gif. I didn't really look at the clues, so I don't know if I would have had the insight about using the extra words to form Wonderfalls episode titles.
I have to say that the structure of the Doctor Who round was brilliant. For those who weren't there: There were eight puzzles with titles like "The Condescending Man Holding a Brightly Colored Parasol", and another eight with titles like "His Investigative Journalist." The puzzles themselves had nothing to do with the Doctor Who TV show, but you had to know how to pair them up, since (1) the Doctor puzzles couldn't be solved without information garnered from the corresponding Companion puzzle, and (2) the answers to the Doctor and Companion puzzles had to be concatenated to get the complete clue for the final answer word. And you also needed to know the number of each Doctor incarnation so you could click the correct "Submit answer" button; this was also the ordering mechanism for the answers.
After the first eight Doctor puzzles was a gap, and a pair of puzzles for The Buzz-Cut Man in a Leather Jacket and His Shopgirl. These were to provide information for the Meta; the fact that they were from the new series was elegant. (And the tenth Doctor and his Medical Intern? They provided the flavortext.)
Zarf, who was sitting next to me, had started working on His Shopgirl, and I was looking at Buzz Cut, and so we decided to pool resources once we realized that the puzzles were actually one doublet. His Shopgirl was fun --- there was a list of forty alien races from Doctor Who, and forty wordplay clues that identified them. The initial letters of the answers spelled out an indication that we had to look up Schwartzchild Wormholes on Wikipedia, and there were highlighted letters that spelled out instructions to start on the Oort Cloud, which we immediately located on the inner board of the "Escape from Zyzzlvaria" board game.
We then debated what grid to use for solving BuzzCut. We decided to just list answers at first, and see what their natural shape would be. Each row was the same number of letters long, so that was fine, but we didn't make the obvious leap at that point. We set it aside for later.
I was
tahnan's Googlemonkey for His Gentlemanly Scotsman, and then we worked together on The Rumpled Man with a Bowl Cut to get that answer. The Rumpled Man looked like it would require knowledge about a bunch of card games (such as Guillotine), but it really only needed identifying which game the cards were from; while some of the questions would have needed knowledge of the games had those questions been relevant, in each case one of the other questions was actually the one that needed answering. It reminded me that I need to do a better job of appreciating puzzles that have a certain intimidation factor but which turn out to be solvable anyway.Tah and I returned to BuzzCut. We filled in a bunch more answers, and he noticed that the second row's "cANDICEBERGEN/Dalai..." was echoed by the penultimate line's "...ferdinAND/ICEBERG/ENds". We fixed a bunch of wrong answers and got a lovely pair of triangles, linked in the middle by a line segment. I went back to the instructions, which said we'd need to make each answer bend once or twice, and I saw that one of our teammates had observed that the diagram of the Schwartzchild Wormhole was topologically a 15x31 cylinder, and I tried to work out a way to make those work together. But I started at the top, when I should have started at the bottom, and we got stalled.
And I went back to staring at Megrez Expedition. And staring. And staring.
By this point it was daytime again. I wandered around the room, helping out here and there with various puzzles, picking up some that had been abandoned and not getting very far on them, standing at the blackboard toying with the metas. I also worked some more on the answers to BuzzCut, getting them a bit more accurate with each pass.
I got to work with
bookishfellow and Dado on Nesting Instinct. It was fun, and Codex really impressed me with the speed with which he disposed of that puzzle.Early Sunday afternoon,
cnoocy asked me to explain how far we'd gotten on BuzzCut. I explained it to him, and he suggested that we try transforming the grid into the wormhole picture by working from the bottom. I copied the grid into Emacs and used some keyboard macros to effect the transformation. And OH MY GOD THE WHOLE THING IS SYMMETRICAL. What an amazing work of construction. We were so impressed that instead of simply taking the answer phrase and running with it, we spent another twenty minutes fixing our incorrect answers so we could bask in the brilliant perfection of it. Finally, we read off the middle line: "On Interior Board." Well, duh, we'd already figured that out from the fact that we had an eight-by-eight grid of answer words and the partial instruction to start on the Oort Cloud. So my hat is off to the constructor of this puzzle, it was a masterful work and a lot of fun to solve, but it was slightly disappointing that after about four hours of work (just on my own part, about fifteen person-hours in all), we got an answer phrase that didn't actually give our team anything --- no dollarbucks, no chance to call in a puzzle for credit, and no additional information.
Finally,
saxikath was looking at Megrez, and I and a few other people were sitting around talking about it. We were discussing what an odd word "Tenebra" is. Suddenly, nearly twenty hours after I had first seen this puzzle, and after hours and hours of staring at it, I had that moment. The moment when I suddenly understood how it worked, and there was not a shred of doubt in my mind, and I had the pride of knowing I was the one who was going to crack this one open for the team. And in a voice full of conviction, I proclaimed:"Nebraska!"
And then we quickly solved the puzzle. All the words with arrows were substrings of the names of cities and their states ("Tenebra" was "La Platte, Nebraska".) My favorite was "Reno, Nevada" which was "NONE" in a double-headed arrow. Reading the initial letters of the cities thus clued gave us instructions on how to derive our final answer.
We felt pretty good about our progress; while we were stuck on some puzzles we kept making slow but steady progress, which was good for morale, and based on the demeanor of the visitors from Hunt HQ we got the feeling that we were still in the running. Around 10:30pm I decided I should probably get some sleep, and I went back to the hotel, leaving instructions that I was to be called if we actually were going to do the runaround.
At 5:00 I woke up, went back to our HQ (because we had agreed to strike the room at 6am) and learned that Beginner's Luck had found the coin at 3:10am. Congratulations, guys!
Overall, I'm quite pleased with how our team did. First of all, we had a lot of fun. No one seemed ready to kill, maim, or even insult anyone else (well, except for you two --- you know who you are, and I think you do it for fun), and when you figure that we were working together under a lot of stress and very little sleep for about 90 hours straight, that's saying a lot. We enjoyed the puzzles, we enjoyed the process of solving the puzzles, and we had a lot of laughs. And we solved a lot of puzzles; our solve rate seemed pretty high (we just got blocked on too many metas) and our wrong-guess rate was gratifyingly low.
I think there were some great innovations this year. The use of "dollarbucks" to open up new rounds was a good way to avoid bottlenecks. The "dollarbucks" system was also a nice way to help equalize the large team/small team stuff. And although the heart of the Hunt was during the time I was away, I think the idea of having a small Hunt that even the smaller and less experienced teams would have a chance to complete is a good one.
I think the problem with this year's Hunt was the Bill Clinton Convention Speech flaw. Remember the speech that was so long that its biggest applause line was "And in conclusion...."? Listening to some of the explanations at the wrapup felt the same way. There were too many instances (the Wheel of Death Meta, for example) where you had to have more than the usual two or three "aha" moments to break through. In my limited experience, the redundant nature of most metas, say, means that if your team simply can't break through on one puzzle, you still have a decent shot at solving the meta without it. In my opinion, there were too many critical junctures in this Hunt, too many places where failure to get one aspect of one puzzle would stop a team dead in its tracks. I think that's why the Hunt lasted as long as it did.
So that's my one gripe. The Bombers did an amazing job of entertaining and challenging us, and once again I say "kudos" and "thank you." I have high hopes for next year's Hunt by Beginner's Luck (or whatever you call yourselves next year), and once again I say "congratulations" and "well done." I am grateful to my teammates on II&F for once again inviting me to solve with y'all and providing just the right balance of "We want to win, but not at the expense of having fun," and once again I say "thank you" and "wait 'til next year!"
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-21 03:03 am (UTC)EDIT: Whoops, it got too long, so I copypasted most of it into an entry. I kept the following here, since it won't be relevant to anyone but IIF.
So first, let me introduce myself. Were you in IIF HQ at stupid AM striking the room? If so, I was one of the four Manic Sages who came in and chatted with you guys on our way to the T. (I was the one who asked after Zarf as we left.) I was also the guy who said, during the wrapup, that Doctor 9's puzzle was the most satisfying AHA moment I've ever had during a mystery hunt. More on that momentarily. :-)
The rest can be found here (http://gwillen.livejournal.com/59494.html).