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rhuThe puzzles aren't reposted yet, so I can't link to them nor can I use them to jog my memory, but I want to capture what I can while I remember it. [The puzzle site always goes down once the Hunt is over, and some time later the puzzles are posted in the official archives, but that intervening downtime is frustrating.]
I should start off by saying how fortunate I am to have a wife who understands how important this is to me, and who makes it possible by her moral and logistical support for me to disappear for three days or so each January. Thank you so much,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
introverte.
Fri 10am, arrived at IIF HQ (IIF -- Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law -- is the team with which I have solved for the last three years) and helped set up. Around 11:40 we went down to Lobby 7 for kickoff; I saw a bunch of friends from other teams, including one to whom I was scheduled to deliver a sevendeck, one whom I was hoping to get to autograph his book, and a slew of others whom I was looking forward to seeing. Yay!
Fri, Noon, kickoff. I loved the idea of using a predistributed mp3 to solve the bad acoustics in Lobby 7; the synchronization didn't work so great but that didn't matter much. Basic plot is that this was the 30th-anniversary Hunt so rather than having a big complex structure with lots of puzzles, it would be one round and then we'd spend the weekend partying. And what could possibly go wrong?
Fri, 12:30pm, Hunt site goes live. I start working with Ata and Karen on "Banner Headline", which is a straightforward if large word search where instead of being given the list of words which we are seeking, we are given the fact that they appear in nine groups and, in each group, we have a list of first letters and enumerations. We quickly suss out that the nine groups are the six basic colors, white, black, and brown, but even so there are so many entries that it takes us until about 2:30 (and the addition of MattS, Tony, and I think one or two others at that point) to find them all. Then we look at the leftover letters and sure enough there's a message which reads "Raise your voices and glasses to our flag" and then appears to devolve into gibberish. A cryptogram perhaps? No, we keep plugging on and soon realize the gibberish is French (hey, when you don't have word breaks it's hard to tell the difference, ok? :-) and specifically the chorus of La Marseillaise. The flavortext suggested "superimposition" so we get a fresh grid and only color in the entries from the blue, white, and red groups. There's a bit of noise in the picture, but there are clearly the words PINOT BLANC in there and we call it in. Turns out the noise was because we were only supposed to color in the entries which matched the color of that area in the flag, so only the blue entries in the left third, the white in the middle, and the red on the right, even if that means only coloring in part of a word. Missing that didn't hurt us too badly, though.
Fri, 3pm. I've only worked on one puzzle for the last two-and-a-half hours, which is a bit of a disappointment since the early puzzles are usually easier and faster and I get more variety before I have to leave for Shabbat. In retrospect, I understand why these puzzles had to be much harder than typical first-rounders, but in the spirit of the one I just solved I say c'est la vie and I take the T home. Yes, the T home, not walking to the Hyatt, because we weren't able to get a hotel room for Arisia this year. (Apparently they're renovating the hotel and so the hotel filled up even earlier than usual.) I made it home exactly at candlelighting, which is a lot closer than I wanted.
Had a wonderful Shabbat. Once it was over, I called a cab and packed my additional supplies.
Sat 6:30pm. Apparently while I was gone the coin got zapped back in time and history is all messed up and we have to solve all these alternate rounds from Mystery Hunts that didn't happen on our original timeline. Sounds like a rich bit of plotting, but frankly when I resurface after missing 27 hours of Hunt I'm never able to take the time to get caught up on plot, I just throw myself into open puzzles and get back to work. It's a shame, because the plot is often clever and entertaining, and I only experience it as a narration in the post-Hunt wrapup. I also usually have completely missed rounds 2 through whatever we're up to.
So let's rejoin IIF in round, I don't know, 7?
I join Andy and Arielle who are working on a puzzle called "Chatterbox", which is putatively about Thomas Edison, but which we realize are really Tom Swifties. I pull my weight, coming up with several of the answers and having the important realizations that (1) each clue has an extra word which rhymes with a cardinal number and which can be used as an index into the adverb for each Swiftie as the extraction mechanism, and (2) alphabetizing the adverbs gives us a plausible ordering mechanism. Andy points out that if we do that we have an almost-complete run of consecutive letters, which helps us to get the remaining answers and a lovely answer.
Sat 7:45pm. Some new puzzles have just arrived and "The Arena" looks like one I can make progress on, so I sign up to solve it. I'm joined by Chris and Karen. It's clearly a 6x6x6 knight's tour, and the words are clued with colored letters. We quickly determine that the answers match the clues in length, which means that once we locate them in the grid we'll also need to transfer the colors to the corresponding letter. The first few answers to fall have rare letters like J and Q and Z, which tricks us into thinking that they'll be easy to locate in the grids, but after a while we realize that there are too many possibilities to do by hand, and I write a quick Python script to brute-force it.
Some of the clues were beautiful, given the constraint of having to have the same total length as their answers. IT HUNG BY A THREAD for SWORD OF DAMOCLES may be my favorite.
Sat 10 pm. Still working on getting the clues solved. Partly misled by the early predominance of high-Scrabble-score letters, partly misled by our own cleverness in noting that SUAVE "GIGI" CROONER would imply LOUIS "____" JOURDAN, because the quotes and lengths of individual clue words would line up that way if Louis Jourdan only had a four-letter nickname. Which he doesn't. (Yes, "doesn't"; he's apparently still alive.) So it takes us hours to think to try the more obvious (and correct) MAURICE CHEVALIER. And we got hung up on others, too, like wanting A MINOR TRANSGRESSOR to incorporate VENIAL.
Sun 12:01am. I realize it's actually JUVENILE DELINQUENT (which has juicy letters, too). The Python script has been very useful, and we've been making decent progress. We now have all the answers, and can start coloring in the grids. shMike observes that we should decompose the colors into red, yellow, and blue so we print out three more and do so. I observe that in each case the resulting patterns would form a contiguous solid in three-space, and we all realize at about the same time that we have three "Godel Escher Bach" solids --- that is, solids which project a letterform as a shadow when illuminated from the top, the front, and the right side. We work out what the resulting projections are, and here's where we make our fatal mistake.
The patterns we get are something like:
(This is from memory, so I may have it slightly off here.)
What letters do you see there? We decided these formed the words EAR, HAT, and a strangely out-of-order HUN. At first I had written the As down as lowercase Ds, but we convinced ourselves that was wrong because (1) the lowercase n and r had clearly defined a single row means a serif, not an ascender, (2) the lowercase letters taken as a group spelled "arena" which was the title of the puzzle, and (3) EAR and HAT are perfectly good words when taken in the obvious order top-front-right, and EDR and HDT are not. We even thought highly of the constructor for using (1) and (2) as ways to confirm to the solver that this shape was supposed to be interpreted as "a" and not as "d".
Sun 1am. I'm looking for something that will let me feel a bit more useful, and shMike asks me to take a look at "This is a Recording", which has been stuck at the final-step stage for a few hours. Fortunately (for my ego and morale, if nothing else) I immediately see what the others had been overanalyzing, and realize that we need to re-transcribe the red-numbered acrostic clue answers as though squares 1-100 are in the spiral instead, and I get to call in a correct answer. (Although I didn't see how the answer word related to any aspect of the puzzle, which caused a moment of worry. But it couldn't possibly be anything else, and we called it in and it was in fact correct. So, fine.)
And then, back to "The Arena".
Sun 2am. We are ready to kill whoever wrote this puzzle. Everyone who has come to look at it and suggest what we're missing accepts our mapping of the squares to letterforms, and instead we focus on how to transform the nine letters we have into an answer. Someone points out that the other answers we have in the meta have the letters S, A, and C and before we can think someone calls in SPARTACUS in desperation. We try to find out if there's a HUTH Arena or a THUH Arena someplace (and, to my eternal shame, we call in the latter, because at this point what do we have to lose? Worst. Guess. Ever.)
Sun 3:30am. It's been almost eight hours. It's time to give up.
(So of course what we did wrong was see those as lowercase 'a' and not 'd'. If we'd seen them as 'd', and read them in the order front-side-top, and taken them red-blue-yellow, we'd have had HUNDREDTH, which agrees nicely with the one line from the flavortext that we had been unable to use. While I'm no longer ready to kill or even maim the constructor of this puzzle, I do feel that the choice of letterforms was an unfortunate one on his part. And I regret not following the procedure of handing off the last step we were certain of to someone in a "clean room" instead of explaining all the steps that got us to where we were stuck.)
Sun 4am. I rejoin the dynamic duo of Andy and Arielle on "Directions." They've solved the word clues and we're trying to get a foothold on the arrows.
Sun 5am. We're still no further into it. I need to find another ego-boost. I spend a few minutes being a second pair of eyes for Albert on Cryptic Clue Cleaving, to no avail. And I stare at Sarah's work on a mostly-finished "Around the World in 80 Days" but can't help her come up with an extraction mechanism for turning the plus-minus numbers (and prices?) into digits for the latitude and longitude.
MattS suggests that "Bulls and Cows" is close to solving but has been stuck for a while, and fortunately that worked out well for me. Once again I get the thrill of taking a puzzle where someone else has done all the hard work and got stuck at the end, and I get to swoop in and say "Have you tried...."? In this case, the team had already solved for the ZIP codes and looked up the city names, but hadn't noticed that the lengths of the city names were the same as the number of guesses in each sequence. I mapped them to each other, used the "wrong" lines as selectors, ordered them in top-to-bottom left-to-right, and got the ugly looking APHTH.... but fortunately I kept going, because the end came out as FEVER so I Googled APHTHOUS FEVER and found that it's the techincal name for Foot-and-mouth disease, which certainly relates to "Bulls and Cows."
Sun 5:50am: Called in APHTHOUS FEVER. New puzzles have become available. I sign up for "Exotic Tactics" and start working on rearranging things to get related words into clue groups. Of course, the first one I see is ANTWERP'S MUSEUM OF TYPE = PLANTIN-MORETUS. Gotta get there someday.
Sun 6am. Starting to feel tired. Time to transcribe my work on "Exotic Tactics" into the wiki and go to the R&R room for a quick nap. As I stand up, someone else says "It's over. Check your email." So I guess I don't need that nap after all. We sit around for a while, mopping up puzzles that are nearly done, and watching Stephen Fry try to say "They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is", and getting ready to strike the room.
Sun 11:30am. Home. Food. Shower. Bed.
So, overall impressions? A nicely done hunt. The theme was entertaining and well-executed. For the most part, people seemed to feel that the puzzles were hard but fair. I had a good time.
Unfortunately (and whether it was the luck of which puzzles I worked on or whether it was the nature of this set of puzzles, I can't say) I ended up working on fewer puzzles for more time each, which meant that I didn't get to co-solve with as many partners and I had fewer moments of puzzle-solving exultation than in the past. The earlier end time of the Hunt also meant that I only got to spend 12 hours puzzling after Shabbat, instead of last year's 24, and of those 12 hours roughly two-thirds were spent on a single puzzle.
I feel pretty good about my individual performance. I solved two abandoned puzzles, contributed useful insights on one team solve, did useful slogging on one, and did a lot of good hard (if ultimately fruitless) work on another. My biggest failure is one that, looking back on, I think was not shameful - I let myself and my solving group get led down a garden path by an unintentional red herring (do you like my new Metaphorsinart?).
Most importantly, I had a lot of fun. Even when I was feeling frustrated with "The Arena", I was enjoying the camaraderie of my teammates and admiring the elegance of the puzzles. And that's why we do this to ourselves every year.
So, until next year, this is 530nm330Hzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, heading for bed.
I should start off by saying how fortunate I am to have a wife who understands how important this is to me, and who makes it possible by her moral and logistical support for me to disappear for three days or so each January. Thank you so much,
introverte.Fri 10am, arrived at IIF HQ (IIF -- Immoral, Illegal, and Fattening, Attorneys at Law -- is the team with which I have solved for the last three years) and helped set up. Around 11:40 we went down to Lobby 7 for kickoff; I saw a bunch of friends from other teams, including one to whom I was scheduled to deliver a sevendeck, one whom I was hoping to get to autograph his book, and a slew of others whom I was looking forward to seeing. Yay!
Fri, Noon, kickoff. I loved the idea of using a predistributed mp3 to solve the bad acoustics in Lobby 7; the synchronization didn't work so great but that didn't matter much. Basic plot is that this was the 30th-anniversary Hunt so rather than having a big complex structure with lots of puzzles, it would be one round and then we'd spend the weekend partying. And what could possibly go wrong?
Fri, 12:30pm, Hunt site goes live. I start working with Ata and Karen on "Banner Headline", which is a straightforward if large word search where instead of being given the list of words which we are seeking, we are given the fact that they appear in nine groups and, in each group, we have a list of first letters and enumerations. We quickly suss out that the nine groups are the six basic colors, white, black, and brown, but even so there are so many entries that it takes us until about 2:30 (and the addition of MattS, Tony, and I think one or two others at that point) to find them all. Then we look at the leftover letters and sure enough there's a message which reads "Raise your voices and glasses to our flag" and then appears to devolve into gibberish. A cryptogram perhaps? No, we keep plugging on and soon realize the gibberish is French (hey, when you don't have word breaks it's hard to tell the difference, ok? :-) and specifically the chorus of La Marseillaise. The flavortext suggested "superimposition" so we get a fresh grid and only color in the entries from the blue, white, and red groups. There's a bit of noise in the picture, but there are clearly the words PINOT BLANC in there and we call it in. Turns out the noise was because we were only supposed to color in the entries which matched the color of that area in the flag, so only the blue entries in the left third, the white in the middle, and the red on the right, even if that means only coloring in part of a word. Missing that didn't hurt us too badly, though.
Fri, 3pm. I've only worked on one puzzle for the last two-and-a-half hours, which is a bit of a disappointment since the early puzzles are usually easier and faster and I get more variety before I have to leave for Shabbat. In retrospect, I understand why these puzzles had to be much harder than typical first-rounders, but in the spirit of the one I just solved I say c'est la vie and I take the T home. Yes, the T home, not walking to the Hyatt, because we weren't able to get a hotel room for Arisia this year. (Apparently they're renovating the hotel and so the hotel filled up even earlier than usual.) I made it home exactly at candlelighting, which is a lot closer than I wanted.
Had a wonderful Shabbat. Once it was over, I called a cab and packed my additional supplies.
Sat 6:30pm. Apparently while I was gone the coin got zapped back in time and history is all messed up and we have to solve all these alternate rounds from Mystery Hunts that didn't happen on our original timeline. Sounds like a rich bit of plotting, but frankly when I resurface after missing 27 hours of Hunt I'm never able to take the time to get caught up on plot, I just throw myself into open puzzles and get back to work. It's a shame, because the plot is often clever and entertaining, and I only experience it as a narration in the post-Hunt wrapup. I also usually have completely missed rounds 2 through whatever we're up to.
So let's rejoin IIF in round, I don't know, 7?
I join Andy and Arielle who are working on a puzzle called "Chatterbox", which is putatively about Thomas Edison, but which we realize are really Tom Swifties. I pull my weight, coming up with several of the answers and having the important realizations that (1) each clue has an extra word which rhymes with a cardinal number and which can be used as an index into the adverb for each Swiftie as the extraction mechanism, and (2) alphabetizing the adverbs gives us a plausible ordering mechanism. Andy points out that if we do that we have an almost-complete run of consecutive letters, which helps us to get the remaining answers and a lovely answer.
Sat 7:45pm. Some new puzzles have just arrived and "The Arena" looks like one I can make progress on, so I sign up to solve it. I'm joined by Chris and Karen. It's clearly a 6x6x6 knight's tour, and the words are clued with colored letters. We quickly determine that the answers match the clues in length, which means that once we locate them in the grid we'll also need to transfer the colors to the corresponding letter. The first few answers to fall have rare letters like J and Q and Z, which tricks us into thinking that they'll be easy to locate in the grids, but after a while we realize that there are too many possibilities to do by hand, and I write a quick Python script to brute-force it.
Some of the clues were beautiful, given the constraint of having to have the same total length as their answers. IT HUNG BY A THREAD for SWORD OF DAMOCLES may be my favorite.
Sat 10 pm. Still working on getting the clues solved. Partly misled by the early predominance of high-Scrabble-score letters, partly misled by our own cleverness in noting that SUAVE "GIGI" CROONER would imply LOUIS "____" JOURDAN, because the quotes and lengths of individual clue words would line up that way if Louis Jourdan only had a four-letter nickname. Which he doesn't. (Yes, "doesn't"; he's apparently still alive.) So it takes us hours to think to try the more obvious (and correct) MAURICE CHEVALIER. And we got hung up on others, too, like wanting A MINOR TRANSGRESSOR to incorporate VENIAL.
Sun 12:01am. I realize it's actually JUVENILE DELINQUENT (which has juicy letters, too). The Python script has been very useful, and we've been making decent progress. We now have all the answers, and can start coloring in the grids. shMike observes that we should decompose the colors into red, yellow, and blue so we print out three more and do so. I observe that in each case the resulting patterns would form a contiguous solid in three-space, and we all realize at about the same time that we have three "Godel Escher Bach" solids --- that is, solids which project a letterform as a shadow when illuminated from the top, the front, and the right side. We work out what the resulting projections are, and here's where we make our fatal mistake.
The patterns we get are something like:
XXXXXX ....XX XX.... XX..XX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XX..XX XX.... XX.... XX..XX XX.... XX..XX XX..XX XX.... XXXXXX XXXXXX XX.... XX..XX ....XX XXXXXX XX..XX XXXXXX XXXXXX XXXXXX XX..XX ..XX.. XXXXXX XX..XX ..XX.. XX..XX XX..XX ..XX.. XX..XX XXXXXX ..XX.. XX.... XX..XX XX..XX XXXXXX XX..XX XX..XX XX..XX XXXXXX XX..XX XX..XX XXXXXX XX..XX XX..XX XX..XX XXXXXX XX..XX XX..XX XXXXXX
(This is from memory, so I may have it slightly off here.)
What letters do you see there? We decided these formed the words EAR, HAT, and a strangely out-of-order HUN. At first I had written the As down as lowercase Ds, but we convinced ourselves that was wrong because (1) the lowercase n and r had clearly defined a single row means a serif, not an ascender, (2) the lowercase letters taken as a group spelled "arena" which was the title of the puzzle, and (3) EAR and HAT are perfectly good words when taken in the obvious order top-front-right, and EDR and HDT are not. We even thought highly of the constructor for using (1) and (2) as ways to confirm to the solver that this shape was supposed to be interpreted as "a" and not as "d".
Sun 1am. I'm looking for something that will let me feel a bit more useful, and shMike asks me to take a look at "This is a Recording", which has been stuck at the final-step stage for a few hours. Fortunately (for my ego and morale, if nothing else) I immediately see what the others had been overanalyzing, and realize that we need to re-transcribe the red-numbered acrostic clue answers as though squares 1-100 are in the spiral instead, and I get to call in a correct answer. (Although I didn't see how the answer word related to any aspect of the puzzle, which caused a moment of worry. But it couldn't possibly be anything else, and we called it in and it was in fact correct. So, fine.)
And then, back to "The Arena".
Sun 2am. We are ready to kill whoever wrote this puzzle. Everyone who has come to look at it and suggest what we're missing accepts our mapping of the squares to letterforms, and instead we focus on how to transform the nine letters we have into an answer. Someone points out that the other answers we have in the meta have the letters S, A, and C and before we can think someone calls in SPARTACUS in desperation. We try to find out if there's a HUTH Arena or a THUH Arena someplace (and, to my eternal shame, we call in the latter, because at this point what do we have to lose? Worst. Guess. Ever.)
Sun 3:30am. It's been almost eight hours. It's time to give up.
(So of course what we did wrong was see those as lowercase 'a' and not 'd'. If we'd seen them as 'd', and read them in the order front-side-top, and taken them red-blue-yellow, we'd have had HUNDREDTH, which agrees nicely with the one line from the flavortext that we had been unable to use. While I'm no longer ready to kill or even maim the constructor of this puzzle, I do feel that the choice of letterforms was an unfortunate one on his part. And I regret not following the procedure of handing off the last step we were certain of to someone in a "clean room" instead of explaining all the steps that got us to where we were stuck.)
Sun 4am. I rejoin the dynamic duo of Andy and Arielle on "Directions." They've solved the word clues and we're trying to get a foothold on the arrows.
Sun 5am. We're still no further into it. I need to find another ego-boost. I spend a few minutes being a second pair of eyes for Albert on Cryptic Clue Cleaving, to no avail. And I stare at Sarah's work on a mostly-finished "Around the World in 80 Days" but can't help her come up with an extraction mechanism for turning the plus-minus numbers (and prices?) into digits for the latitude and longitude.
MattS suggests that "Bulls and Cows" is close to solving but has been stuck for a while, and fortunately that worked out well for me. Once again I get the thrill of taking a puzzle where someone else has done all the hard work and got stuck at the end, and I get to swoop in and say "Have you tried...."? In this case, the team had already solved for the ZIP codes and looked up the city names, but hadn't noticed that the lengths of the city names were the same as the number of guesses in each sequence. I mapped them to each other, used the "wrong" lines as selectors, ordered them in top-to-bottom left-to-right, and got the ugly looking APHTH.... but fortunately I kept going, because the end came out as FEVER so I Googled APHTHOUS FEVER and found that it's the techincal name for Foot-and-mouth disease, which certainly relates to "Bulls and Cows."
Sun 5:50am: Called in APHTHOUS FEVER. New puzzles have become available. I sign up for "Exotic Tactics" and start working on rearranging things to get related words into clue groups. Of course, the first one I see is ANTWERP'S MUSEUM OF TYPE = PLANTIN-MORETUS. Gotta get there someday.
Sun 6am. Starting to feel tired. Time to transcribe my work on "Exotic Tactics" into the wiki and go to the R&R room for a quick nap. As I stand up, someone else says "It's over. Check your email." So I guess I don't need that nap after all. We sit around for a while, mopping up puzzles that are nearly done, and watching Stephen Fry try to say "They say of the Acropolis, where the Parthenon is", and getting ready to strike the room.
Sun 11:30am. Home. Food. Shower. Bed.
So, overall impressions? A nicely done hunt. The theme was entertaining and well-executed. For the most part, people seemed to feel that the puzzles were hard but fair. I had a good time.
Unfortunately (and whether it was the luck of which puzzles I worked on or whether it was the nature of this set of puzzles, I can't say) I ended up working on fewer puzzles for more time each, which meant that I didn't get to co-solve with as many partners and I had fewer moments of puzzle-solving exultation than in the past. The earlier end time of the Hunt also meant that I only got to spend 12 hours puzzling after Shabbat, instead of last year's 24, and of those 12 hours roughly two-thirds were spent on a single puzzle.
I feel pretty good about my individual performance. I solved two abandoned puzzles, contributed useful insights on one team solve, did useful slogging on one, and did a lot of good hard (if ultimately fruitless) work on another. My biggest failure is one that, looking back on, I think was not shameful - I let myself and my solving group get led down a garden path by an unintentional red herring (do you like my new Metaphorsinart?).
Most importantly, I had a lot of fun. Even when I was feeling frustrated with "The Arena", I was enjoying the camaraderie of my teammates and admiring the elegance of the puzzles. And that's why we do this to ourselves every year.
So, until next year, this is 530nm330Hzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz, heading for bed.