Mystery hunt roundup
Jan. 17th, 2011 03:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyOK, solutions are now available (no stats yet though), so time to start recounting things. Let me first quote what I stated in the previous entry, snipping out irrelevant bits...
Anyway. Now comes the part where I talk about stuff I worked on and how it went, so...
I didn't come in until like 10 PM Friday night, so we were already on the Mega Man round, and a good way into it, when I got there. Actually by that point it was less of "remote solving team meet-up" and more "party in Kevin's office"; Kevin, me, and someone named Kathy seemed to be the only people actually solving. (For that matter I don't know if anyone else was at any point.)
Ultimately I'd say I only ended up making substantial contributions to only 5 puzzles: The Writing on the Wall, St. Andrew's Links, Payroll, Unnatural Law, and Unlikely Situations. Although Payroll ended up getting backsolved before we could finish it.
ADDENDUM three hours later The Eternal Struggle - Before I could get to this one, some people were already writing a program to solve it. First time they ran it, though, they concluded it was impossible. We later solved it, so evidently they eventually fixed this.
Bio Man meta - I actually didn't work on this one at all. I'd just like to note this was the one meta puzzle that stumped us for the entire hunt. If we had got this we would have got the "solved all metas" achievement.
Pesky Bugs - Didn't work on this either. It's notable because at the very end, when the onsite people were doing the final runaround, some remote solvers went back and tried to solve the metas we hadn't gotten yet (at the time, we hadn't solved Da Vinci's Workshop either), and we ended up using our second extra life on this one (although somehow we ended up at -20 coins? O_o).
Pointillisme - This neither. But from what I recall hearing about it, it seems our big mistake was looking for the pictures not in Paris, but in Cambridge...
ADDENDUM three hours later: Games - This neither, I just wanted to say, I'm disappointed I missed this one...
The Writing on the Wall - Plotted the graph structure immediately, helped identify false statements (relying heavily on Google Books, and for the two public domain ones, online texts - I thought of running over to the library and getting physical copies of the books, but then realized that, lacking a search function, this wouldn't be very helpful unless I was already familiar with the books). Once someone realized they were seven-segment displays, and that some of the statements were false, the rest was pretty immediate... but we got stuck for a while, because we failed to identify two of the false statements regarding A Connecticut Yankee, leaving that display as a 4 rather than a 1, and TNURUS didn't seem a sensible answer. Indeed, I think it actually got backsolved before we realized that mistake.
ADDENDUM three hours later: The Light World - I made some minor notes on this one, but it doesn't look like they actually helped.
Execution Grounds - Actually, by the time we got to the Zelda round, I was the only one still around and solving in East Hall. I guess Kevin doesn't stay up so late... in any case, I didn't really contribute much to this one, just did some grunt work. We never really got very far on this one; a bunch of the words are obvious, and we used the hangman condition to get some more, but we never, SFAIK, noticed the whole "letters guessed in a given cycle" condition, so we weren't able to determine most of them. (Though we did correctly-incorrectly get "enjoyable" based on a spurious "words-that-decompose-into-two-other-words" theme we thought we saw...) So we never got the STGABRIEL answer, nor anywhere near the second answer. However we did notice the numbers-every-4 theme (and used this to fill in a few words), so we did get FLAG DAY, the "third" answer. This misled us, however, as it caused us to look for similar themes that occurred every 4 words, such as the pseduo-compound-words theme mentioned above.
Eventually I had to go to sleep. I didn't start solving again Saturday until like 5 PM, so we were well into the Civilization round by then. I went to East Hall, expecting to find Kevin having organized some more people, but nobody was around and I didn't want to walk back home, so I just sat down in the common room and checked some stuff on the internet, figuring on start by myself soon if nobody else turned up. MVK was also around, had also been trying to find Kevin, but he disappeared shortly. Eventually Kevin showed up, also later Kathy, and we got to work, but then they disappeared, so I was just by myself in the East Hall common room till like 4 in the morning. Evidently he got back to work from somewhere, though, as I later saw him in the chatroom for Payroll (someone thought it might be useful to find someone who actually speaks Hebrew, and he was called in).
A Modern Palimpsest - I didn't work on this one at all, my only involvment with this one was Kevin asking me if I could tell what it was the fireman changed into. (It was a janitor, apparently.)
Technological Crisis at Shikakuro Farms - So disappointed I missed this one!
Advanced Maths - This one too. Interestingly not all the representations were worked out explicitly; looking at our wiki, addition we just characterized as "addition where 1+1=1100", and noted that "11+111=0 because it goes infinite".
Crowd's Chant - We ended up using an extra life on this one.
Literary Collection - I just want to say, this one was *confusing*.
Part of Speech - The first three were already done when I started on this one; I never got anywhere near solving the remaining two.
Da Vinci's Workshop - This one took us a long time to get; it was the one Civilization meta we hadn't solved when we solved the supermeta. In fact we didn't solve it until during the final runaround, when remote solvers went back to solve the remaining metas! We were missing two of the prerequisites, Puzzle Box and Racking Your Brains. The former was particularly problematic, as its answer is used three times! No idea how we eventually got this one, seeing as those two still remained unsolved at the end; if it was backsolved, whoever did it must have been fiendishly clever. Or someone may have realized the colors connection (we hadn't when I last looked at it), and used backsolving to constrain the possibilities?
St. Andrew's Links - Kevin was working on this one and asked me what could be clued by "BURDEN". "Albatross", I responded. Apparently nobody who had been working on that had yet remembered that "albatross" is a term for three under par, but then it may have been just him working on it at that time. This fixed the problem with "WANDERING" (currently we had "eagle?"). I also pointed out that MALTESE FALCON could be "bogey" (even though the Maltese Falcon is not the name of his character...); I think at first we had "eagle?" there, though we did end up leaving that possibility there - yes, a falcon is not an eagle, but neither is the Maltese Falcon Bogey's character! I think we later decided it might even be "birdie", since, well, a falcon is a bird... so Kevin and I worked on that one for a while but we couldn't quite put it together.
We weren't sure whether the scores should index into the answers, the technology names, or the puzzle names, though at least the last of those produced totally unusuable results. We were missing the answers to Crowd's Chant and Fascinating Kids (we hadn't used the extra life on the former yet), and couldn't figure out how to fill in the blanks. (We also missed that the remaining two should both clue "eagle", since assuming Maltese Falcon was "bogey", this meant we had used "bogey", "birdie", and "albatross" each twice.) So we had the possibilities: F_URI_ON, E_URI_ON, W_RTL_RD, and P_RTL_RD (not sure how that last one got there, guess we never noticed that mistake). Eventually someone more familiar with golf walked by back at HQ and said, "Oh, it's FOUR IRON". D'oh.
ADDENDUM three hours later: Also, I wasted a bit of time looking up the pars on the holes on the actual Old Course at St. Andrew's Links. Yup, not related. There aren't any par 6's or par 7's there.
Interstellar Spaceship - Didn't work on this one, just wanted to point out that we were delayed for a long time on the Civilization round. We eventually got to Katamari only by, well, however you get to next rounds without solving supermetas, I wasn't too clear on that; when we finally got there, we had only one of the metas solved (St. Andrew's Links). We did end up solving Interstellar Spaceship before the Katamari supermeta, however, so no Warp Whistle achievement for us.
Efficiency - I just want to say, I'm sure glad I didn't work on this one.
Plotlines - Easy to see the idea of, harder to actually do (not unlike Part of Speech). Didn't actually work on this one.
Losing my nerve - Did anyone else assume that the numbers meant how far you were supposed to turn something? (Didn't actually work on this one.)
Payroll - Oh man. Spent a long time on this one; this one was a killer. I didn't start on it until a while in, when people had already figured out raw English answers to most of the clues (and noticed they were alphabetical) but were still puzzled on what to do with them to fit into the grid. Also by this point someone had noticed some of them "contained Greek letters", and had started abbreviating them that way, though not necessarily very consistently - e.g. while PYRO got abbreviated as {pi}{rho}, TETANUS got abbreviated as T{eta}NUS initially. We were also using numerals, as well. But this still wasn't short enough. I had the idea of reading *all* letters by their names, thus shortening EM{pi}RE to M{pi}R, and quite a few others. Well, OK, at first I just said we should do this where possible, because that still obviously wasn't enough. In particular a lot of words ended in "-TION"... what to do about them? Drag in another alphabet? Cyrillic didn't seem to help... how about Hebrew? Aha! That has a [shin]! And a [resh]! And a [tet]! ...and suddenly things made sense.
As soon as I pointed this out people got the final forms of words almost immediately, though (due to the length conditions) there were a few that where puzzling (we ended up going with {rho}DZN for RHODESIAN, which was correct; {sigma}ND for ZSIGMONDY and K[nun] for CANAAN also didn't seem quite right, even though they were; meanwhile we weren't sure whether ALFALFA should be {alpha}{alpha} or [aleph]{alpha}; more on that later). More of a problem was that this showed that some of our words were wrong; NEUROSCIENCY and VIDEOPHILE took quite a while to get, as did BEAUTIFIER. The biggest puzzler, however, was EUROPHILE; intially we had EXPATRIATE, for which I wrote "X[pe]38???", seeing as we had long ago eliminated the use of numerals. Later we had EMISSARY, that is, MSRE.
But even with all this, there was still a problem; we'd satisfied the length conditions, but we still couldn't find positions where the words could go and things would match up. I made a graph of the possibilities for the 2x2 box, and showed it was impossible with what we had currently. Not to mention the problem of ALFALFA - whether you wrote it as {alpha}{alpha} or [aleph]{alpha}, neither of those letters showed up anwhere else in the puzzle! Eventually someone suggested it could be ALFIE, i.e. L{phi}, so we went with that for the time being. Finally we came to the condlusion that, well, some of the letters are Hebrew, Hebrew is written right-to-left... that means not all the words have to go in their usual direction, but could go right-to-left or bottom-to-top as well. (Some people suggested just the words with Hebrew letters should go right-to-left, but this doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it - after all, there was only one word that had *only* Hebrew letters...).
As you know if you've looked at the solution, our conclusion "this is impossible as is" was correct, but our conclusion of which constraint to break was wrong. All the words do go left-to-right and top-to-bottom. The key insight that we missed was to use uppercase Greek letters, and identify Greek letters with Latin ones in the cases where they looked the same. Thus, ALFALFA was AA, RHODESIAN was PDZN, etc. We never got to the point of noticing that, however, because at about that point some other people managed to backsolve it.
Also, I only just noted now that "Payroll" is [pe]{rho}L.
Walkthrough - I didn't work on this one, because I figured it was one of those ones that required you to be at MIT. Nope.
Unnatural law - By the time I got to this one, people had already noticed that each paragraph described some law or principle named after a person, and determined what most of them were, though they hadn't noticed they were alphabetical (actually I'm not certain we ever noticed that). Which was strange, because what I noticed was that each paragraph described a violation of some amendment to the US constitution! Naturally, we were both right, but apparently I made that puzzle doable; they had already tried indexing into each paragraph based on the numbers at the top, but couldn't tell what to do with them. However, we got further stuck for a while in that sorting by amendment number didn't seem to help. The answer, of course, was to sort, *then* index, but it took a while for anyone to notice that. (Also, it took me a while to notice the 12th amendment violation in the Fermat's Last Theorem paragraph, over what looked to be a 4th or 5th amendment violation... of course, amendment numbers 4 and 5 were already used, a problem if you want to sort by them...)
ADDENDUM three hours later: I should note, when I read through it the first time, I did notice the three laws of robotics, the equivalence of different formulations of universal computing (though I failed to recognize this explicitly as the Church-Turing Thesis), and Rice's theorem; but my brain really flagged on the amendments, after noticing the reference to the 27th amendment, and the next few seemed to confirm it - especially after seeing the reference to the 3rd amendment.
E Pluribus Unum - I got to this one really late, with only two of them not done - the first one, and the one that provides the answer. People had tried the Seven Deadly Sins in the first one, to no avail, and were having to come up with other possibilities. "How can this not be sins?!", the comments read. I suggested that the seven deadly sins would indeed fit if we used HUBRIS for pride. Naturally, this wasn't the right answer. People ultimately solved it without getting that.
Unlikely situations - This was an easy one. We got this one only 23 minutes after unlocking it (yay, an achievement :) ). I was first to note on the wiki that these were all XKCD comics and to start writing down the numbers for them. Once some other people joined in, we had this one fast. I imagine, given that the solution referred to the comic from the same day Mystery Hunt started - and that the resulting answer had to fit into the supermeta - that they must have had to coordinate it with Randall Munroe, but I don't see him credited among the authors. Hm.
ADDENDUM three hours later: Other ones I'm disappointed I missed, though I didn't look at them at the time: Meta Testing, Nik-holey, Sufficiently Advanced Technology (though not knowing D&D, there's no way I could have gotten the second part of that). Also, during the first night of solving, Kevin pointed out Keyboard Cat to Nic as just a fun game (we had long since solved it); at one point I took a break to play it, ignoring the actual puzzle-solving aspect of it. Also, I find Unfair Cryptogram really amusing.
ADDENDUM six hours later: Also also, the solution to You Shall Understand What Hath Befallen kind of scares me.
Also: I was under the impression that there's usually a duck conundrum each year? There doesn't seem to have been one this year.
So yes, actually being on the winning team was quite a surprise. Kevin pointed out to me at one point how we were like 3 orders of magnitude ahead of the auto-points; however I figured that we had to still be behind the *really* good teams, because we'd gotten to the Katamari round without solving Interstellar Spaceship, which I thought was bad. Evidently, I was wrong. (Also, not being sure how getting to next rounds worked, I may have also been flat-out wrong about what that indicated about our position. :P )
So that was this year. I guess I won't be able to help Kevin next year, but hopefully I can, y'know, just go back to Manic Sages... I ended up being by myself in East Hall most of the time anyway... :P
-Harry
MIT Mystery Hunt is this weekend. Not forgetting about it this year. I'm afraid I'm going to have to betray Youlian, though; while I could remote solve for Manic Sages, I'd be by myself, unless I wanted to try to organize other people, which I am terrible at. And these puzzles are not really things to be worked on in solitude. And Kevin, who's organizing a remote solving team in East Hall, solves for Codex. So having no particular loyalty to any team (having just been introduced to the hunt two years ago by Youlian and having hardly any idea of who the teams actually are), I guess that means I'm Codex this year.So, yeah. I ended up solving for Codex, who, as I guess you already know if you've been following this at all, actually ended up winning. Seeing as I'm just a friend-of-a-remote-solver, I hope that doesn't mean I have to sit out next year... in any case as someone still very new to this, I don't expect it would be either advisable or much possible to get me involved with the writing. :P (I did briefly catch some beginnings of ideas that people stated. But seeing as the next one's a year away, I don't think that should be a problem. :P )
Anyway. Now comes the part where I talk about stuff I worked on and how it went, so...
I didn't come in until like 10 PM Friday night, so we were already on the Mega Man round, and a good way into it, when I got there. Actually by that point it was less of "remote solving team meet-up" and more "party in Kevin's office"; Kevin, me, and someone named Kathy seemed to be the only people actually solving. (For that matter I don't know if anyone else was at any point.)
Ultimately I'd say I only ended up making substantial contributions to only 5 puzzles: The Writing on the Wall, St. Andrew's Links, Payroll, Unnatural Law, and Unlikely Situations. Although Payroll ended up getting backsolved before we could finish it.
ADDENDUM three hours later The Eternal Struggle - Before I could get to this one, some people were already writing a program to solve it. First time they ran it, though, they concluded it was impossible. We later solved it, so evidently they eventually fixed this.
Bio Man meta - I actually didn't work on this one at all. I'd just like to note this was the one meta puzzle that stumped us for the entire hunt. If we had got this we would have got the "solved all metas" achievement.
Pesky Bugs - Didn't work on this either. It's notable because at the very end, when the onsite people were doing the final runaround, some remote solvers went back and tried to solve the metas we hadn't gotten yet (at the time, we hadn't solved Da Vinci's Workshop either), and we ended up using our second extra life on this one (although somehow we ended up at -20 coins? O_o).
Pointillisme - This neither. But from what I recall hearing about it, it seems our big mistake was looking for the pictures not in Paris, but in Cambridge...
ADDENDUM three hours later: Games - This neither, I just wanted to say, I'm disappointed I missed this one...
The Writing on the Wall - Plotted the graph structure immediately, helped identify false statements (relying heavily on Google Books, and for the two public domain ones, online texts - I thought of running over to the library and getting physical copies of the books, but then realized that, lacking a search function, this wouldn't be very helpful unless I was already familiar with the books). Once someone realized they were seven-segment displays, and that some of the statements were false, the rest was pretty immediate... but we got stuck for a while, because we failed to identify two of the false statements regarding A Connecticut Yankee, leaving that display as a 4 rather than a 1, and TNURUS didn't seem a sensible answer. Indeed, I think it actually got backsolved before we realized that mistake.
ADDENDUM three hours later: The Light World - I made some minor notes on this one, but it doesn't look like they actually helped.
Execution Grounds - Actually, by the time we got to the Zelda round, I was the only one still around and solving in East Hall. I guess Kevin doesn't stay up so late... in any case, I didn't really contribute much to this one, just did some grunt work. We never really got very far on this one; a bunch of the words are obvious, and we used the hangman condition to get some more, but we never, SFAIK, noticed the whole "letters guessed in a given cycle" condition, so we weren't able to determine most of them. (Though we did correctly-incorrectly get "enjoyable" based on a spurious "words-that-decompose-into-two-other-words" theme we thought we saw...) So we never got the STGABRIEL answer, nor anywhere near the second answer. However we did notice the numbers-every-4 theme (and used this to fill in a few words), so we did get FLAG DAY, the "third" answer. This misled us, however, as it caused us to look for similar themes that occurred every 4 words, such as the pseduo-compound-words theme mentioned above.
Eventually I had to go to sleep. I didn't start solving again Saturday until like 5 PM, so we were well into the Civilization round by then. I went to East Hall, expecting to find Kevin having organized some more people, but nobody was around and I didn't want to walk back home, so I just sat down in the common room and checked some stuff on the internet, figuring on start by myself soon if nobody else turned up. MVK was also around, had also been trying to find Kevin, but he disappeared shortly. Eventually Kevin showed up, also later Kathy, and we got to work, but then they disappeared, so I was just by myself in the East Hall common room till like 4 in the morning. Evidently he got back to work from somewhere, though, as I later saw him in the chatroom for Payroll (someone thought it might be useful to find someone who actually speaks Hebrew, and he was called in).
A Modern Palimpsest - I didn't work on this one at all, my only involvment with this one was Kevin asking me if I could tell what it was the fireman changed into. (It was a janitor, apparently.)
Technological Crisis at Shikakuro Farms - So disappointed I missed this one!
Advanced Maths - This one too. Interestingly not all the representations were worked out explicitly; looking at our wiki, addition we just characterized as "addition where 1+1=1100", and noted that "11+111=0 because it goes infinite".
Crowd's Chant - We ended up using an extra life on this one.
Literary Collection - I just want to say, this one was *confusing*.
Part of Speech - The first three were already done when I started on this one; I never got anywhere near solving the remaining two.
Da Vinci's Workshop - This one took us a long time to get; it was the one Civilization meta we hadn't solved when we solved the supermeta. In fact we didn't solve it until during the final runaround, when remote solvers went back to solve the remaining metas! We were missing two of the prerequisites, Puzzle Box and Racking Your Brains. The former was particularly problematic, as its answer is used three times! No idea how we eventually got this one, seeing as those two still remained unsolved at the end; if it was backsolved, whoever did it must have been fiendishly clever. Or someone may have realized the colors connection (we hadn't when I last looked at it), and used backsolving to constrain the possibilities?
St. Andrew's Links - Kevin was working on this one and asked me what could be clued by "BURDEN". "Albatross", I responded. Apparently nobody who had been working on that had yet remembered that "albatross" is a term for three under par, but then it may have been just him working on it at that time. This fixed the problem with "WANDERING" (currently we had "eagle?"). I also pointed out that MALTESE FALCON could be "bogey" (even though the Maltese Falcon is not the name of his character...); I think at first we had "eagle?" there, though we did end up leaving that possibility there - yes, a falcon is not an eagle, but neither is the Maltese Falcon Bogey's character! I think we later decided it might even be "birdie", since, well, a falcon is a bird... so Kevin and I worked on that one for a while but we couldn't quite put it together.
We weren't sure whether the scores should index into the answers, the technology names, or the puzzle names, though at least the last of those produced totally unusuable results. We were missing the answers to Crowd's Chant and Fascinating Kids (we hadn't used the extra life on the former yet), and couldn't figure out how to fill in the blanks. (We also missed that the remaining two should both clue "eagle", since assuming Maltese Falcon was "bogey", this meant we had used "bogey", "birdie", and "albatross" each twice.) So we had the possibilities: F_URI_ON, E_URI_ON, W_RTL_RD, and P_RTL_RD (not sure how that last one got there, guess we never noticed that mistake). Eventually someone more familiar with golf walked by back at HQ and said, "Oh, it's FOUR IRON". D'oh.
ADDENDUM three hours later: Also, I wasted a bit of time looking up the pars on the holes on the actual Old Course at St. Andrew's Links. Yup, not related. There aren't any par 6's or par 7's there.
Interstellar Spaceship - Didn't work on this one, just wanted to point out that we were delayed for a long time on the Civilization round. We eventually got to Katamari only by, well, however you get to next rounds without solving supermetas, I wasn't too clear on that; when we finally got there, we had only one of the metas solved (St. Andrew's Links). We did end up solving Interstellar Spaceship before the Katamari supermeta, however, so no Warp Whistle achievement for us.
Efficiency - I just want to say, I'm sure glad I didn't work on this one.
Plotlines - Easy to see the idea of, harder to actually do (not unlike Part of Speech). Didn't actually work on this one.
Losing my nerve - Did anyone else assume that the numbers meant how far you were supposed to turn something? (Didn't actually work on this one.)
Payroll - Oh man. Spent a long time on this one; this one was a killer. I didn't start on it until a while in, when people had already figured out raw English answers to most of the clues (and noticed they were alphabetical) but were still puzzled on what to do with them to fit into the grid. Also by this point someone had noticed some of them "contained Greek letters", and had started abbreviating them that way, though not necessarily very consistently - e.g. while PYRO got abbreviated as {pi}{rho}, TETANUS got abbreviated as T{eta}NUS initially. We were also using numerals, as well. But this still wasn't short enough. I had the idea of reading *all* letters by their names, thus shortening EM{pi}RE to M{pi}R, and quite a few others. Well, OK, at first I just said we should do this where possible, because that still obviously wasn't enough. In particular a lot of words ended in "-TION"... what to do about them? Drag in another alphabet? Cyrillic didn't seem to help... how about Hebrew? Aha! That has a [shin]! And a [resh]! And a [tet]! ...and suddenly things made sense.
As soon as I pointed this out people got the final forms of words almost immediately, though (due to the length conditions) there were a few that where puzzling (we ended up going with {rho}DZN for RHODESIAN, which was correct; {sigma}ND for ZSIGMONDY and K[nun] for CANAAN also didn't seem quite right, even though they were; meanwhile we weren't sure whether ALFALFA should be {alpha}{alpha} or [aleph]{alpha}; more on that later). More of a problem was that this showed that some of our words were wrong; NEUROSCIENCY and VIDEOPHILE took quite a while to get, as did BEAUTIFIER. The biggest puzzler, however, was EUROPHILE; intially we had EXPATRIATE, for which I wrote "X[pe]38???", seeing as we had long ago eliminated the use of numerals. Later we had EMISSARY, that is, MSRE.
But even with all this, there was still a problem; we'd satisfied the length conditions, but we still couldn't find positions where the words could go and things would match up. I made a graph of the possibilities for the 2x2 box, and showed it was impossible with what we had currently. Not to mention the problem of ALFALFA - whether you wrote it as {alpha}{alpha} or [aleph]{alpha}, neither of those letters showed up anwhere else in the puzzle! Eventually someone suggested it could be ALFIE, i.e. L{phi}, so we went with that for the time being. Finally we came to the condlusion that, well, some of the letters are Hebrew, Hebrew is written right-to-left... that means not all the words have to go in their usual direction, but could go right-to-left or bottom-to-top as well. (Some people suggested just the words with Hebrew letters should go right-to-left, but this doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it - after all, there was only one word that had *only* Hebrew letters...).
As you know if you've looked at the solution, our conclusion "this is impossible as is" was correct, but our conclusion of which constraint to break was wrong. All the words do go left-to-right and top-to-bottom. The key insight that we missed was to use uppercase Greek letters, and identify Greek letters with Latin ones in the cases where they looked the same. Thus, ALFALFA was AA, RHODESIAN was PDZN, etc. We never got to the point of noticing that, however, because at about that point some other people managed to backsolve it.
Also, I only just noted now that "Payroll" is [pe]{rho}L.
Walkthrough - I didn't work on this one, because I figured it was one of those ones that required you to be at MIT. Nope.
Unnatural law - By the time I got to this one, people had already noticed that each paragraph described some law or principle named after a person, and determined what most of them were, though they hadn't noticed they were alphabetical (actually I'm not certain we ever noticed that). Which was strange, because what I noticed was that each paragraph described a violation of some amendment to the US constitution! Naturally, we were both right, but apparently I made that puzzle doable; they had already tried indexing into each paragraph based on the numbers at the top, but couldn't tell what to do with them. However, we got further stuck for a while in that sorting by amendment number didn't seem to help. The answer, of course, was to sort, *then* index, but it took a while for anyone to notice that. (Also, it took me a while to notice the 12th amendment violation in the Fermat's Last Theorem paragraph, over what looked to be a 4th or 5th amendment violation... of course, amendment numbers 4 and 5 were already used, a problem if you want to sort by them...)
ADDENDUM three hours later: I should note, when I read through it the first time, I did notice the three laws of robotics, the equivalence of different formulations of universal computing (though I failed to recognize this explicitly as the Church-Turing Thesis), and Rice's theorem; but my brain really flagged on the amendments, after noticing the reference to the 27th amendment, and the next few seemed to confirm it - especially after seeing the reference to the 3rd amendment.
E Pluribus Unum - I got to this one really late, with only two of them not done - the first one, and the one that provides the answer. People had tried the Seven Deadly Sins in the first one, to no avail, and were having to come up with other possibilities. "How can this not be sins?!", the comments read. I suggested that the seven deadly sins would indeed fit if we used HUBRIS for pride. Naturally, this wasn't the right answer. People ultimately solved it without getting that.
Unlikely situations - This was an easy one. We got this one only 23 minutes after unlocking it (yay, an achievement :) ). I was first to note on the wiki that these were all XKCD comics and to start writing down the numbers for them. Once some other people joined in, we had this one fast. I imagine, given that the solution referred to the comic from the same day Mystery Hunt started - and that the resulting answer had to fit into the supermeta - that they must have had to coordinate it with Randall Munroe, but I don't see him credited among the authors. Hm.
ADDENDUM three hours later: Other ones I'm disappointed I missed, though I didn't look at them at the time: Meta Testing, Nik-holey, Sufficiently Advanced Technology (though not knowing D&D, there's no way I could have gotten the second part of that). Also, during the first night of solving, Kevin pointed out Keyboard Cat to Nic as just a fun game (we had long since solved it); at one point I took a break to play it, ignoring the actual puzzle-solving aspect of it. Also, I find Unfair Cryptogram really amusing.
ADDENDUM six hours later: Also also, the solution to You Shall Understand What Hath Befallen kind of scares me.
Also: I was under the impression that there's usually a duck conundrum each year? There doesn't seem to have been one this year.
So yes, actually being on the winning team was quite a surprise. Kevin pointed out to me at one point how we were like 3 orders of magnitude ahead of the auto-points; however I figured that we had to still be behind the *really* good teams, because we'd gotten to the Katamari round without solving Interstellar Spaceship, which I thought was bad. Evidently, I was wrong. (Also, not being sure how getting to next rounds worked, I may have also been flat-out wrong about what that indicated about our position. :P )
So that was this year. I guess I won't be able to help Kevin next year, but hopefully I can, y'know, just go back to Manic Sages... I ended up being by myself in East Hall most of the time anyway... :P
-Harry
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Date: 2011-01-18 05:48 am (UTC)You unlocked the next world with the warp zones that unlocked with the supermeta. In the first three cases, this was an easy runaround type thing; the last was "build a spaceship".
I worked on payroll too, at the stage that we basically had to put the answers in the grid. We never figured out that we had to identify some Greek with English, and I'm still not sure if I like that. Anyway, we managed enough to get the initial J and the D, V, E of DRIVE, so that along with knowing it needed to contain MEGA, was enough for someone to suggest the answer. I don't think we got EUROPHILE ever, either. I think we decided we like [aleph]{alpha} better...It was like 4am Sunday morning.
As for metas, I was in the meta room, so I can say firsthand that we never solved Bio man, Stagecraft man, or DaVinci's Workshop. It took us less of FOURIRON than you, I think we had the F.UR..ON, and we saw it immediately. However, we managed the world 1-3 meta with ZERO puzzle answers. I mean, it was seven letters, started with a P and was a star, what else could it be?
no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 06:51 am (UTC)Pure backsolving initially caused us to call in HOMEGAME for Payroll. Not sure how they eventually corrected it to IOMEGA, though I recall that at least one puzzle - possibly that one - was backsolved by doing a search of all Wikipedia article titles!
How did you know it started with a P if you had zero puzzle answers...?
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Date: 2011-01-18 04:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-18 09:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-19 11:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 12:15 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-20 02:30 am (UTC)