Weekend part 1: Mystery Hunt
Jan. 21st, 2010 12:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
magidLast year I was nominally affiliated with Left as an Exercise for the Reader, but really did very little, just enough to whet my appetite (and bring snacks :-). Also, this year I wanted to take advantage of the fact that Arisia was still just down the street (for the last time in the foreseeable future), so I joined them again, with the intent to do a lot more. Happily, I did (taking advantage of a more flexible work schedule :-).
I got to the team room early (we were again in 26-314, which is now "26 pies" room in my head) so I could go to the start at noon in Lobby 7 with some teammates (*waves*, especially to team captains![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rhysara and bubblebabble), meeting some of them for the first time. When we got there, the energy was palpable, rather like what I imagine it would be like to be in Times Square just before midnight on December 31st, though to my mind, with considerably more reason for the buzz. At noon, an mp3 started playing, and everyone listened using the iPods and such they'd brought (this is apparently new this year, to get around the horrible acoustics of the space). This year's 30th anniversary hunt was going to be a pleasant jaunt, an afternoon of puzzle solving to be followed by some puzzles from Hunts past. What could go wrong?
Everyone streamed back to team rooms and waited for the site to go live at 12:30. And then it started! First we saw this year's puzzles, ten puzzles and a meta. Perhaps it would be as originally described? Since the meta went live first, we had a bit of time to play around with what it might mean, knowing there was no way to get anywhere with it, but tossing around ideas anyway.
And then the other ten 2010 puzzles went live. I ended up working on Banner Headline with Ross. We found lots of words, and a chance comment fromqueue got us categorizing them by color. We were just getting to the end of that phase when I realized I had to leave to get my Arisia badge before Shabbat. I was sad to be missing the end of the puzzle, but at least I'd done some decent work, and was there when Bubblebabble and someone else finished the first puzzle for the team, Training Exercise, which I still think was designed for him especially, incorporating public transportation in Boston and DC :-). (I was glad to hear later that Banner Headline had been finished, with an overlay of the French flag to figure out which overlapping letters to pull out as the answer. I'm still unclear exactly how they got there, though.)
Shabbat morning I meandered back to the Hunt, and found a lot fewer people around, but more puzzles available: apparently there had been some change, and now it was not the 30th, but the 300th anniversary of the Hunt, and there were more puzzles to be solved from previous (select) years. Though, as it turned out, none were quite as anyone remembered, since time travel also seems to involve alternate universes... The home page people were checking now looked like this, which I rather liked.
I sat around looking at 2009's Planar Complex for a bit, but without using a pencil, I couldn't get much further than "all complex numbers that are factorable, except "THE." Which was useless. I thought longer words might have greater absolute values, but they didn't, and there didn't seem to be any pattern I could see for graphing them (not that I could do that, though I later found someone else had had the same idea).
So I gave up, and started looking at the other puzzles listed as undone on the board (pink rather than blue cards). There were some I had ideas about how to solve, but without the requisite specific knowledge, would be useless at. And others that I couldn't figure out at all. In the end, I settled on SeekingSyren Scotchy, which looked doable if I worked with someone who writes on Saturdays. There was another guy working on it, trying to write programs to solve them, but that didn't seem to be fruitful. After a while, Ross showed up again, and started working with me, wielding wits and colored pens as we solved the four remaining 11 by 11 grids (the last four at the link) to figure out the path. Someone else figured out how each title translated into a number and color (I have no idea how). And it wasn't long until I realized that yet again, I should head off to Arisia.
Oh, and in the middle there, I'd been shanghaied to be in a less-than-five-minute remake of Donnie Darko for 2010's Tuo_Yrrej_Peek. It was strange, saying lines for a precis of a movie I'd never seen. (The result is here.)
I stayed at Arisia until well after Shabbat, then brought my stuff home from where I'd been staying closer to the hotel. After a shower and some protein, I headed east again, deciding I'd spend a couple of hours at MIT, then head over for the club dance, as I'd promised people I'd go.
It didn't work out quite as planned.
When I got there, there were more puzzles available, and the one that I thought would be appealing was only available as hard copy, 1983's Building a Mystery. I found the printout, and started in on the clues along each edge of the squares, hexagons, and octagons. There were 26 of them, one for each letter of the alphabet, and some of the clues repeated. Once I'd gotten those figured out, the question was what to do with them. Hexagons tessellate, as do octagons with squares, but they don't go together. Still, it seemed worth cutting the shapes out. Luckily Ross came by and suggested that they form a three-dimensional solid rather than a planar one. I wasn't sure whether this was possible, but he showed it was, and worked the rest of the puzzle with me. It turned out that the clues pointed from one face to the next, describing the letter on that face (and in that font, which threw me for a loop; I don't think of any letters as having just one endpoint, for instance). And that gave the way to assemble them into a net of the solid, once we'd also realized that some faces had to be flipped as well. In the end, we taped it together, and the solution was the word showing on the surface, the letters that had been flipped, and in order, too, to spell REYNOLDS. It was called in, and right! I was super-excited, having done a puzzle (correctly) from start to finish. And I was only, oh, three hours late to the dance...
I'd hoped to have more puzzle time, but this year's Hunt ended at 6 A.M. on Sunday, and even with the extra couple of hours allowed for other teams to finish up what they could, there wasn't time for me to make it back. Still, we solved as many puzzles as last year, and I was extremely pleased to have been much more useful this year (and still brought snacks :-).
I got to the team room early (we were again in 26-314, which is now "26 pies" room in my head) so I could go to the start at noon in Lobby 7 with some teammates (*waves*, especially to team captains
rhysara and bubblebabble), meeting some of them for the first time. When we got there, the energy was palpable, rather like what I imagine it would be like to be in Times Square just before midnight on December 31st, though to my mind, with considerably more reason for the buzz. At noon, an mp3 started playing, and everyone listened using the iPods and such they'd brought (this is apparently new this year, to get around the horrible acoustics of the space). This year's 30th anniversary hunt was going to be a pleasant jaunt, an afternoon of puzzle solving to be followed by some puzzles from Hunts past. What could go wrong? Everyone streamed back to team rooms and waited for the site to go live at 12:30. And then it started! First we saw this year's puzzles, ten puzzles and a meta. Perhaps it would be as originally described? Since the meta went live first, we had a bit of time to play around with what it might mean, knowing there was no way to get anywhere with it, but tossing around ideas anyway.
And then the other ten 2010 puzzles went live. I ended up working on Banner Headline with Ross. We found lots of words, and a chance comment from
queue got us categorizing them by color. We were just getting to the end of that phase when I realized I had to leave to get my Arisia badge before Shabbat. I was sad to be missing the end of the puzzle, but at least I'd done some decent work, and was there when Bubblebabble and someone else finished the first puzzle for the team, Training Exercise, which I still think was designed for him especially, incorporating public transportation in Boston and DC :-). (I was glad to hear later that Banner Headline had been finished, with an overlay of the French flag to figure out which overlapping letters to pull out as the answer. I'm still unclear exactly how they got there, though.)Shabbat morning I meandered back to the Hunt, and found a lot fewer people around, but more puzzles available: apparently there had been some change, and now it was not the 30th, but the 300th anniversary of the Hunt, and there were more puzzles to be solved from previous (select) years. Though, as it turned out, none were quite as anyone remembered, since time travel also seems to involve alternate universes... The home page people were checking now looked like this, which I rather liked.
I sat around looking at 2009's Planar Complex for a bit, but without using a pencil, I couldn't get much further than "all complex numbers that are factorable, except "THE." Which was useless. I thought longer words might have greater absolute values, but they didn't, and there didn't seem to be any pattern I could see for graphing them (not that I could do that, though I later found someone else had had the same idea).
So I gave up, and started looking at the other puzzles listed as undone on the board (pink rather than blue cards). There were some I had ideas about how to solve, but without the requisite specific knowledge, would be useless at. And others that I couldn't figure out at all. In the end, I settled on Seeking
Oh, and in the middle there, I'd been shanghaied to be in a less-than-five-minute remake of Donnie Darko for 2010's Tuo_Yrrej_Peek. It was strange, saying lines for a precis of a movie I'd never seen. (The result is here.)
I stayed at Arisia until well after Shabbat, then brought my stuff home from where I'd been staying closer to the hotel. After a shower and some protein, I headed east again, deciding I'd spend a couple of hours at MIT, then head over for the club dance, as I'd promised people I'd go.
It didn't work out quite as planned.
When I got there, there were more puzzles available, and the one that I thought would be appealing was only available as hard copy, 1983's Building a Mystery. I found the printout, and started in on the clues along each edge of the squares, hexagons, and octagons. There were 26 of them, one for each letter of the alphabet, and some of the clues repeated. Once I'd gotten those figured out, the question was what to do with them. Hexagons tessellate, as do octagons with squares, but they don't go together. Still, it seemed worth cutting the shapes out. Luckily Ross came by and suggested that they form a three-dimensional solid rather than a planar one. I wasn't sure whether this was possible, but he showed it was, and worked the rest of the puzzle with me. It turned out that the clues pointed from one face to the next, describing the letter on that face (and in that font, which threw me for a loop; I don't think of any letters as having just one endpoint, for instance). And that gave the way to assemble them into a net of the solid, once we'd also realized that some faces had to be flipped as well. In the end, we taped it together, and the solution was the word showing on the surface, the letters that had been flipped, and in order, too, to spell REYNOLDS. It was called in, and right! I was super-excited, having done a puzzle (correctly) from start to finish. And I was only, oh, three hours late to the dance...
I'd hoped to have more puzzle time, but this year's Hunt ended at 6 A.M. on Sunday, and even with the extra couple of hours allowed for other teams to finish up what they could, there wasn't time for me to make it back. Still, we solved as many puzzles as last year, and I was extremely pleased to have been much more useful this year (and still brought snacks :-).