2021 Mystery Hunt roundup
Jan. 19th, 2021 03:23 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoySo obviously I didn't go up to Boston this year. But with Daniel and Emma showing up here at Solarium so often anyway, well, they showed up here and so we had our little Plant sub-team here. Cassels also showed up Sunday to help out with Divided Is Us. We also managed to recruit Alex for Game Ditty Quiz and for Treasure Maps. As usual, I didn't start until well after kickoff Friday, so I missed the Yew Labs round.
Plant seemed to do pretty well this year. Not like last year when, when the coin was found, there were still a number of rounds we hadn't unlocked yet. This year -- well, we didn't make it to the final runaround (?), which I gather required solving all the round metas -- but we had at least unlocked most of the puzzles by the end. I mean, in most of the rounds we had unlocked all the puzzles, but the one exception was in ⊥IW.giga, where we never so much as made it to ⊥IW.kilo, let alone to ⊥IW.milli. So we only saw about 1/3 of the puzzles in that round. Also, on the Green Building, we only unlocked 10 of the 13 switches, since each switch requires solving a puzzle.
Since I wasn't there when we unlocked ⊥IW.giga, I didn't really understand what was up with the structure. I mean, it's definitely a cool idea, but pretty opaque for anyone joining late and just checking spreadsheets. I am glad at least that they managed to execute on this cool idea better than, say, the White Queen round from 2014, which also had a nifty idea about doing things in reverse, but mostly failed to pull it off (with A Puzzle with the answer WILLIAMS being the only one that really managed to pull it off).
The navigation puzzles... IDK, I feel like our team didn't have the best communication there maybe -- or, OK, maybe lots of people knew about it, but I didn't, and I'm not sure Emma or Daniel did either. We did have spreadsheets for these, but, um, they were in a place I didn't think to look for them. Honestly I mostly left all this to other people. I let other people find the puzzles in the Green Building and Stata Center, and I avoided the Infinite Corridor round entirely because I didn't want to take the time to figure out what was going on with its confusing gimmick. I did find a lot of the students and athletes, though.
I basically only found out about where we'd been writing this stuff down when I went to tell people that I'd figured out how to get into cluster 1. The other three cluster entrance puzzles had been solved while I was asleep, but the last one, cluster 1, unlocked while I was awake, and I figured out how to get in. Actually, while I mostly figured out the rules for how the keypad worked, I didn't quite grasp how the # key worked (although it was essential to the solution), and so didn't make the connection to bowling. Anyway I ended up just announcing my answer in the general chat, where I was then told about the spreadsheet...
Of course where this really led to a lack of coordination was in the tunnels. Emma and I spent quite some time getting past the ghosts in the tunnels, but, um, we didn't really write down like any of what we found, because we didn't know where the spreadsheets were. Actually this kind of led to us just not writing down what worked there in general, which meant not really finding answers to the various ghost puzzles, but rather just doing it by feel. The exceptions to this, where I did come up with explicit rules, were the ghost puzzles where the things to sort were not just words, but were other things, such as names of TV shows or strings of parentheses. In those cases coming up with explicit rules was much easier, and you could basically get the rule without writing anything down. Still, there was definitely a fair bit of coordination failure there.
(Also, until Emma told me -- when the hunt was nearly over -- I had no idea how to get to ⊥IW.giga... I was just like, I'm in building 16, I don't see a door to the north...)
Also, I still have no idea what was up with the person in Killian Court saying to enter 072 and 120 into the cluster 10 keypad. I did that and it didn't seem to do anything...?
Oh well. Anyway, on to individual puzzles!
★ -- I got the initial part of this, with the "miracle" clues, but then didn't really do anything with the rest; other people did that.
Alternate Controls -- Daniel figured out what the alternate controls were, but apparently think to note down what these keys normally do in Microsoft Word. I added a few that I knew but I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Word to test with and uh somehow I didn't think to just look it up. So, uh, we didn't end up solving this one. Also it turns out you only need to focus on the ones that are different, which would have made things easier, but I didn't know that.
Countries -- Daniel was the one who suggested maybe these were flags. Initially someone (Emma?) had suggested the last country might be Russia, based on coal deposits, and someone else on the team (not one of us three) suggested the first one might be Italy. Once Daniel suggested flags, though, I was able to identify Djibouti, and he (I think) identified Finland, and then it was just like, yup, these are flags. I deleted the "Italy" entry outright rather than moving it to another column, which, um, annoyed the person who had entered it, oops. But still, it was indeed flags, and we managed to identify the rest. Some were obvious (Kazakhstan), but some took a while. I remember Emma figuring out Brazil and me being like oh man how did I miss that; she's also the one who got Lesotho. I remember I got Nauru. Marshall Islands gave us a fair bit of trouble; I think it was one of the people we were talking to who found it. Bosnia and Herzegovina we didn't get at all; at Daniels' suggestion, we ended up using Christmas Island (not really a country) instead, which did get us the right shape but not the right name to extract from. Still, even with the second letter wrong, it was clear what the answer had to be.
Exactly -- This one got kicked off with the first one, "chance of successfully navigating an asteroid field". I think this was originally marked down as 1/3720; I later changed it to just 3720 so we'd have integers. Then we realized they were in numerical order and it got changed back to 1/3720. I nitpickingly corrected it to 1/3721 -- which it turns out I was right about :P -- but this got changed back and I didn't bother fixing it further because it's not like it would affect the answer anyway. Similarly I messed up putting 525,600 rather than just 525,000 for "moments so dear", but again, it didn't matter; the puzzle writers anticipated both of these. They may not have anticipated our extra precision on Mrs. Whatsit's age, but, again, it didn't affect the answer.
Anyway yeah I did a bunch of the work on this one. We relied on a team member with Mathematica to do the final calculation; I initially tried to do it straight in Google Sheets, which, yeah, didn't work. (I didn't know about the issue with it not even giving the correct GCD with the emergency services number...) The person who did it in Mathematica was all prepared to go turning up precision as necessary but her initial attempted yielded the 14000605 we needed. Someone misidentified this as being from Doctor Who, but I pointed out they meant Doctor Strange, and we got the answer. :)
FedEx -- Ugh, this one. Daniel, Emma, and I solved the word search, and I noticed the FedEx arrows. But what I wrote down was the letter such arrows pointed to immediately, since, of course, we didn't know about the numbers yet. Then Daniel noticed the Konami code in there... but what do we do with that? None of us thought to try just entering it at that screen, so this didn't get solved until much later, by someone else.
Heart of the Cards -- Oh man, this one. I took a look at this one after other people had already done a lot of the work and were trying to figure out how to extract an answer. People couldn't figure out the correct way to perform the fusion, and, I couldn't either. I tried one or two things that hadn't been already, but none of it yielded a sensible answer. The real answer is not something I would have thought of at all. Someone else solved it later though.
Illiterate Programming -- I got to this one after the programming langauges had been identified and thought, hm, maybe it has to do with their respective comment characters? No, it didn't. Later people noticed the 26 words thing, but didn't know what to look for. Someone tried indexing into the sentences with the letters of "DONALD A KNUTH" (to which someone else pointed out, hey, his middle name is "Ervin"), which of course didn't yield anything. We didn't solve this one.
Magic Words -- I did some initial identification on this, but had no idea what to do after that, and much of what I wrote down was wrong. I remember someone else had to point out to me that that was the logo for Edge, not Internet Explorer. :P I also misidentified the raven with its head cut off as a crow wearing a scarf. Someone else put down "doe-shoe" for the deer initially, before other people pointed out that that is not a doe. I think the only ones I had right were "dig-well" and "shackle-cue". Other people solved this one later.
Musical Theater Guild -- An easy one! I and some other people filled out the Magic clues, while yet other people filled out the musical clues. I put Niv Mizzet instead of Ral Zarek because I didn't count, oops.
Namesake -- Oh, this is one I was pretty key in. I started out solving the clues up top, of course; I didn't know what the theme was, of course, so my first guess was that answers should be four letters. That didn't get corrected until later.
But, OK, what are the maps? I had no idea. One of them I thought was maybe New York Harbor (rotated), but on checking a map, no, it wasn't. Finally I was like, well, KOBE is a Japanese city, maybe I should take a look at that? And, bam, there it was. Oh look, that's route 21, I guess we put down a 1. So I guess we have to do the same thing with other cities... hey, these are all in Japan, aren't they? Problem is, identifying the maps is still hard. Fortunately someone who lives in Japan heard about this and came on and was able to identify the maps much more readily. We didn't even get them all (the TONE clue we never even solved) but the answer was looking like COSMOPOLITAN so we called that in.
Numbers -- I think I was unhelpful here by being like, let's get exact fractions, rather than just doing decimals... (the last one doesn't even repeat within the space given...) Anyway I ended up not really working on this one after doing some fraction conversions, so other people did this separately later and I didn't really help with it.
Paint -- Emma and I took a brief look at this and had no idea what was going on. Other people got it later.
Simplicity -- I didn't really work on this at all. I took a look at it when someone had already written down city names on the spreadsheet (aside from the last one), but without any reasoning given; I suspect at that point the only reasoning they had was, well, it basically looks right. I was basically like, yeah, that does look right, but what the hell's going on here? Daniel had the same reaction. Other people solved this later.
Stay Hydrated -- Oy.
The Lexicographer Looks After His Own -- I didn't work on this at all, it's just a nifty puzzle.
Things -- This one is also kind of amusing.
Tic Tac Toe -- I think it was Emma who noticed the three-in-a-row pattern. I remember we were stuck on the boats clue for a bit; we started looking a list of types of boats, and Emma was like, dinghies! And I go to put in "dinghy" and she's like, no, it's plural "dinghies" that works, and I was like, oh, whoa, nice.
Who's that Pokémon? -- Daniel, Emma, and I did a bunch on this one. The thing about identifying the images up top is that most of the time you really only needed to get one component to match it to a Pokemon, so this wasn't that hard. Although somehow at the end when I was like, OK we have to do something with the remaining two, and somehow didn't realize we could just combine them to get "Napoleon". :P I think this is partly because I was thinking of "Empoleon" as *already* being a combination with "Napoleon" being the back half, so the idea of combining it with something *else* to get "Napoleon" didn't feel right.
Burton-Conner Meta -- I looked at what we had so far and went looking for other BC answers, and some could indeed be rephrased that way, but none of the ones we had at the time fit; the one I remember was "ARCHIVED EDITIONS", which could be "BACK CATALOGUE" if only it fit. This wouldn't be solved until we had more info later.
Simmons Hall Meta -- I didn't work on this one at all, I just think this one was neat.
A Bit of Light -- Hoo boy, this one. When I got to this one, someone else had already noticed that the bytes could be read as Braille, although they only partly decoded it? I decoded the rest. There was a nonsense character after the word "HEX", but since the message thus far had clued to use Braille ASCII, I later identified that as a semicolon. Anyway, I then decoded the hex at the end to get "int=>hex=>SSD", but what to do from there?
I think it was Daniel who noticed that the colors were resistor code colors, but how to intepret them to get actual numbers? For quite a while, nobody got anywhere with this. I got tripped up by the fact that the violet looked pink to me, and, well, pink is a resistor code color, but it doesn't encode a digit, so that leads to problems. I gave up on this, and seemingly so did everyone else; it wasn't until quite a while later that I came back to this and saw that someone had written down all the colors in the spreadsheet and oh hey that's not pink that's violet.
Well, knowing that, that immediately suggested a path. I took the colors on each byte as decimal numbers and converted to hex as instructed. I initially messed this up by looking at columns instead of bytes, and then by reading each byte in the wrong order. Oops. But once I had the right order, I finally got things which clearly looked related to one another, and it was pretty simple to figure out how to convert each one to a seven-segment display hex digit. But this got us a confusing message: "DA7E 1919 07 22 CA5E 1310719A 432221707726202B7E7B1D076E". Someone suggested we flip it upside down, which I thought sounded like a good idea... fortunately someone else suggested the right answer -- that "DA7E" and "CA5E" were presumably "DATE" and "CASE" -- before we tried that. I did a bit of searching and found the patent referred to, and, with a bit of checking Wikipedia (not reading the patent itself!), learned that it was the patent on one-time pads. It was more specifically a patent on one-time pads using Baudot encoding, but, uh, we just xor'ed our two hex sequences together, which is what we were supposed to do. Someone else then converted to ASCII and extracted "LUMINESCENT" (I got tripped up by those 2A's on both ends...).
Bad Air Day -- I ended up doing this one by myself late at night when most people were asleep. I don't know anything about fashion, of course; the way I figured out that's what it was was by searching for things possibly related to the popcorn one. Of course once I found that the rest was fairly straightforward. Two of the fashion shows I couldn't figure out which plane matched, but, whatever, that was enough to get out "CATWALK FOR US".
Unfortunately, this was one of those puzzles where you have to do a thing afterward, and I wasn't about to do the thing. So we didn't actually get this one counted as solved until quite a while later. Ugh. I don't like this sort of thing. If I've solved the puzzle part of the puzzle, I want the puzzle to be solved! Why does there have to be a non-puzzle part of the puzzle?
Complexity Evaluation -- Oy, this one. I started this one off by trying to evaluate what complexity classes applied but I didn't always get it right. And it didn't occur to me to ask, which of these are known true vs known false vs unknown; I just asked, which are (known) true. Also, I missed at first that Problem 6 had the input in unary, which of course puts it in P/Poly (and apparently AC0, though I didn't catch that) despite being undecideable. But yeah, I had no idea what to do with that beyond this, and apparently neither did anyone else; we never ended up solving this one. I also apparently messed up a few of the complexity identifications, and I really had no idea what to do with AC0...
Dolphin -- I wish I'd tried to recruit Alex's help on this one, he's played so many GameCube games...
Harmony -- I tried to recruit Geoff with this one. :) He did not join though. I meant to work on this, but it seems at some point I forgot about it and never got back to it. Oops. So I have no idea how far we got with this one; we apparently didn't end up solving it though.
Successively More Abundant in Verbiage -- Oh man. I'm glad that other people figured out what was going on with this one because I sure didn't. I did help out with identifying one or two of the quotes and pictures. I'm not sure any of us got why the second drawing of each pair was worse; whoever matched them up in the spreadsheet actually matched up the shorter ones with the worse drawings, but since I'd thought to add a column for the letters from the paired ones, we still got the right answer by reading down that column!
Boggle Battle -- I helped out a bit with this one. First two levels are not too bad, but levels 3 and 4! The lack of diagonals on 3 is a killer, and 4 is made hard not only by the unintuitive graph but by the fact that letters typically have so few neighbors, so there just aren't a lot of options...
Divided Is Us -- Oh boy, this one. So, this one ran into a number of difficulties. Firstly, technical difficulties. Emma, Daniel, and I tried to do this together with Joia, another member of Plant, and got a few levels in; doing it without being able to see their screen was hard, but we managed for a bit, before finally Joia just shared her screen and it got easier. Unfortunately, Emma, who was Two, had to reload at one point, after which we found that none of us could get Two. Did someone else open it up, get Two, and then just leave the tab open or something? :-/ We thought about possibly asking HQ to kick our entire team out of there.
We eventually returned to this on Sunday, this time with Cassels as the fourth, as mentioned above, so we were all doing this from one place. This went better, although we did have to put in the spreadsheet that please if you are not one of the four people who are doing this please don't interfere! Fortunately eventually the interference stopped, and we managed to make it all the way to level 8.
Level 8, however, we couldn't beat. Indeed it seemed to be straightforwardly unsolveable. It turns out that there is a way of winning, but we couldn't find it and gave up. That didn't mean giving up on the puzzle, though! After all, maybe you weren't supposed to beat level 8; maybe at this point you were supposed to sit down and extract an answer.
In reality, this was a little off -- it was level 9 that was truly straightforwardly unsolveable (like, in level 9, you don't even have control, and one of the screens says "END"), and which clued the extraction. But we didn't know about level 9. We should have inferred its existence because, like, if they wanted to indicate that you should stop trying to win and extract, they'd do that overtly, not by giving you an impossible level. But given that our extraction efforts seemed to be working, we didn't.
Like, even without seeing the flag and dot clues in level 9, we still got the semaphore and Braille to spell out "SECOND GRAND". So is that the answer? "SECOND GRAND"? (Or "GRAND SECOND"?) No, it isn't. So what could be clued by "SECOND GRAND"?
A bit of searching yielded "Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws" and "Second Grand Alliance" as phrases starting with "second grand". So I tried both "Constitution and Bylaws" and "Alliance", but neither was correct. Now the actual answer, in fact, was "SECOND GRAND ALLIANCE"! And if I'd been thinking, there's more to the extraction that we don't know, what would complete "SECOND GRAND" to form an answer, then maybe I would have thought to submit that. But instead I was thinking of "SECOND GRAND" as the entire extracted message, and so instead was looking for what it clued, and omitted it from my answers.
Daniel did suggest that the player sprites might form part of the extraction -- which they do! -- but the problem is that without the info from Level 9, it's not really possible to get anywhere with that...
So yeah, despite coming so close, we never ended up solving this one. Blech.
You Will Explode If You Stop Talking -- Emma wanted to also do this one together, but we didn't end up doing it.
Untitled Goose Goals -- I ended up doing this one. There was some duplication of effort here, another team member started doing it after me, but I finished it first. Actually, funny thing, the NPC with the goose hat was covered by other sprites when I went to go talk to them so I couldn't actually see their appearance; so I didn't find them by their appearance, I just talked to arbitrary NPCs in Lobby 10 until one of them was the right one!
Mysterious Figures -- Hoo boy, this one. This one gave us a lot of trouble and we did not end up solving it. When I got to it, it had already been abandoned once. People had already figured out the puzzle's workings, but were having trouble completing it. Most of the non-Mr.-Men grid was filled out, but the Mr. Men grid was quite sparse, and someone had attempted the numerical puzzle but given up. I added two more answers to the non-Mr.-Men grid, but they were both wrong. For the "Back to the Future" one I put Mr. Fusion (which doesn't actually appear in the first movie, oops; I've never actually seen these movies) and for the strongest man in the world I put Mr. Satan. But neither of these fit the alphabetization constraint! Oops.
I actually did put Mr. Uppity in the correct spot for the Mr. Men clues, but later deleted it because, could that really be right? Tuns out, it was! But we just had so little of those filled out that we were just not close to solving this, especially with the numerical puzzle given up as well.
Questionable Answers -- Just kind of a neat puzzle. Imagine if Jeopardy! normally worked this way...
Connections -- Huh, I guess the clue answers were not in fact all four letters long. (I only worked on this briefly at the very start, and thought that the clue answers were all four letters long, which they weren't. (So e.g. instead of "BATTERY", I put "AAAA". :P ) The people who actually stuck around to work on this one did in fact solve it.)
Extensive -- I didn't work on this, though Emma did a bit. I just think this is an amusing puzzle.
Radical Rebuses -- This puzzle is surprisingly simple upon looking up the solution, but we got nowhere on it. Did our team not have people familiar with Chinese proverbs...? If I were back at Truth House I imagine Angus might have gotten this! Heh, if J.R. were solving with us that might have helped, but she's not really the sort for puzzles...
Treasure Maps -- This one of the two that got Alex to join. He identified most of the tile sets (we were missing one -- actually I think he had the right idea for that one two but we, uh, messed up some letter counts >_> ), but then we didn't really know what to do from there and got nowhere further on it.
Balancing Act -- I tried to help out with this one towards the very end. Other than solving the clues we had basically no idea what to do. We were also really stuck on the L clue. I almost put down "CHAUMURKY" for that. :P
Don't Get Eaten -- Wondering, just where was this Alchemist Sphinx? I don't think I found it.
Altered Beasts -- I remember some people thought that the 9 transformations corresponded to the 4 rows and 5 columns, so that each cell had exactly two of them. Turns out no. Anyway I didn't really end up helping with this one. Eventually it got solved though.
Game Ditty Quiz -- Hoo boy, this one. This was really the one that got Alex to join in. Video game musing and Games Done Quick, how could he not? :)
We identified most of the tracks without too much trouble, but a few we didn't recognize -- and of course, one, the 16-second one, was so sped-up as to be unrecognizeable. Alex managed to identify that one anyway by opening it up in Audacity and slowing it the hell down until it became identifiable as "Still Alive".
Meanwhile we also started identifying the runs. We had one or two of them wrong at first, but with the run time = track time * 60 constraint, we were able to get them all (although we had the wrong Mario Galaxy run for a bit due to me misreading the year on it; the time was a little off, but I ignored that until it led to a nonsensical answer later). We hadn't identified all the tracks beyond what game they came from, but, hey, seems the runs were what mattered, right?
Anyway, with the runs identified, we got "VG LEAD SHEETS", but what the hell do we do with that? We tried submitting it as the answer, but nope. (Just to be sure, since we hadn't fixed my Mario Galaxy mistake, we also tried submitting the mistaken version, "VG LEID SHEETS". :P )
Fortunately eventually I thought to try searching that, and, hey, turns out that's a website! So now we needed to go back and identify the remaining tracks so we could look them up there. Problem was, what to do with them?
I thought the flavor text was hinting that we should make use of the arranger/transcriber, so I put that down in the spreadsheet... but then what? I also put down the quarter-note value (don't know the correct term here), which turned out to be irrelevant. Someone else had to come in and provide the answer, that yup, you just index into the transcriber's name. I guess I didn't think of that since we'd already used those index numbers to index into the runner's name; the idea that they'd just reuse the same number somehow didn't occur to me.
Unfortunately, this got us the message "MAKE US A COVER", which... yup. Another one where we solved the puzzle part, and now would have to do a non-puzzle thing before it would count as solved. :-/ Neither of us were about to do this and we kicked it over to the rest of the team.
The next day still nobody had done this, so I suggested to Alex we could throw together something quickly. Alex decided to do something a bit higher-quality though, and also didn't really tell people he was doing this, so, uh, someone else on the team did end up doing this by the time he finished. Oh well.
Anyway, nifty puzzle, but man I am not liking these puzzles where you have to do a non-puzzle thing afterward. It's really just frustrating, to solve the puzzle but not receive credit for it until possibly like a day later.
Clusters Meta -- I came to this one where someone had noticed there was something of a Greek-Latin thing going on, but they didn't take it very far. They were like, SCRIPT -> GRAPH? MULTI -> POLY? ORTHO -> RECT? And that was pretty much it. I was like, hey, this can be taken much further, we can transform whole words! And so I started filling those in... "rectangular", "manufacture" (it was actually supposed to be "manufacturer" but whatever, the puzzle writers accounted for small variations like this), "epigraph", "polymer". Two of them gave us a bit of trouble... "carnivore" I originally turned into "sarcophage", which, um, is not a word (although it still would have worked!). I thought it was the name of a Magic card; I was thinking of Sarcomancy. It was Emma who pointed out that it could be "sarcophagus". The other troublesome one was "malformation". I originally put "cacomorph" for this. Again, not a word. At this early stage, I wasn't worrying too much about matching suffixes or parts of speech, as you can see. Emma later suggested "catamorphism", which at least is an actual word, but "cata" isn't a great match for "mal". It was someone else on the team who finally suggested "dys", and I was like, but "dysmorphism" isn't a word, until I was like "oh wait but dysmorphia" is, and there we go.
The rest of the feeder answers, unfortunately, we were missing, so it was hard to get much further. Well, OK -- had we realized what you were supposed to do, we could have gotten "__TR_ GL_SS_", which might have been helpful, but we didn't. What we did notice is that the first letters of the transformed words seemed to be leading towards "SPIDER WOMAN" -- you could get that by rearranging them and adding the correct number of extra letters -- so, as a guess, we tried submitting that. Since that wasn't it, we also tried "ARACHNE", and, at my suggestion, "WEBMISTRESS". But none of those worked, so yeah...
Clueless -- We realized this was a Hanabi puzzle, but that was about it. I didn't work on this one.
Ignorance -- I remember Emma spent quite a bit of time on this one. Ultimately we didn't end up solving it though.
Pitch Black -- I made an initial stab at recording what was going on in these rooms, but I missed a lot of it! We didn't end up solving this one.
The IMO Shortlist -- The country codes confused me on this one, because apparently the IMO uses its own three-letter country codes rather than the ISO ones. Someone else pointed this out when I was like, hey, these aren't all real country codes...
I didn't do much on this one. I solved A3 (although I got it wrong at first because it's been quite a while since I've had to think about Dirichlet convolutions or Möbius inversion!) and I fixed a teammate's incorrect answer to A6. But I didn't really help with the overall structure of the problem. We did solve it eventually.
And, I think that's it!
As for Mystery Hunt 2022, well, next year in Cambridge?
Plant seemed to do pretty well this year. Not like last year when, when the coin was found, there were still a number of rounds we hadn't unlocked yet. This year -- well, we didn't make it to the final runaround (?), which I gather required solving all the round metas -- but we had at least unlocked most of the puzzles by the end. I mean, in most of the rounds we had unlocked all the puzzles, but the one exception was in ⊥IW.giga, where we never so much as made it to ⊥IW.kilo, let alone to ⊥IW.milli. So we only saw about 1/3 of the puzzles in that round. Also, on the Green Building, we only unlocked 10 of the 13 switches, since each switch requires solving a puzzle.
Since I wasn't there when we unlocked ⊥IW.giga, I didn't really understand what was up with the structure. I mean, it's definitely a cool idea, but pretty opaque for anyone joining late and just checking spreadsheets. I am glad at least that they managed to execute on this cool idea better than, say, the White Queen round from 2014, which also had a nifty idea about doing things in reverse, but mostly failed to pull it off (with A Puzzle with the answer WILLIAMS being the only one that really managed to pull it off).
The navigation puzzles... IDK, I feel like our team didn't have the best communication there maybe -- or, OK, maybe lots of people knew about it, but I didn't, and I'm not sure Emma or Daniel did either. We did have spreadsheets for these, but, um, they were in a place I didn't think to look for them. Honestly I mostly left all this to other people. I let other people find the puzzles in the Green Building and Stata Center, and I avoided the Infinite Corridor round entirely because I didn't want to take the time to figure out what was going on with its confusing gimmick. I did find a lot of the students and athletes, though.
I basically only found out about where we'd been writing this stuff down when I went to tell people that I'd figured out how to get into cluster 1. The other three cluster entrance puzzles had been solved while I was asleep, but the last one, cluster 1, unlocked while I was awake, and I figured out how to get in. Actually, while I mostly figured out the rules for how the keypad worked, I didn't quite grasp how the # key worked (although it was essential to the solution), and so didn't make the connection to bowling. Anyway I ended up just announcing my answer in the general chat, where I was then told about the spreadsheet...
Of course where this really led to a lack of coordination was in the tunnels. Emma and I spent quite some time getting past the ghosts in the tunnels, but, um, we didn't really write down like any of what we found, because we didn't know where the spreadsheets were. Actually this kind of led to us just not writing down what worked there in general, which meant not really finding answers to the various ghost puzzles, but rather just doing it by feel. The exceptions to this, where I did come up with explicit rules, were the ghost puzzles where the things to sort were not just words, but were other things, such as names of TV shows or strings of parentheses. In those cases coming up with explicit rules was much easier, and you could basically get the rule without writing anything down. Still, there was definitely a fair bit of coordination failure there.
(Also, until Emma told me -- when the hunt was nearly over -- I had no idea how to get to ⊥IW.giga... I was just like, I'm in building 16, I don't see a door to the north...)
Also, I still have no idea what was up with the person in Killian Court saying to enter 072 and 120 into the cluster 10 keypad. I did that and it didn't seem to do anything...?
Oh well. Anyway, on to individual puzzles!
★ -- I got the initial part of this, with the "miracle" clues, but then didn't really do anything with the rest; other people did that.
Alternate Controls -- Daniel figured out what the alternate controls were, but apparently think to note down what these keys normally do in Microsoft Word. I added a few that I knew but I didn't have a copy of Microsoft Word to test with and uh somehow I didn't think to just look it up. So, uh, we didn't end up solving this one. Also it turns out you only need to focus on the ones that are different, which would have made things easier, but I didn't know that.
Countries -- Daniel was the one who suggested maybe these were flags. Initially someone (Emma?) had suggested the last country might be Russia, based on coal deposits, and someone else on the team (not one of us three) suggested the first one might be Italy. Once Daniel suggested flags, though, I was able to identify Djibouti, and he (I think) identified Finland, and then it was just like, yup, these are flags. I deleted the "Italy" entry outright rather than moving it to another column, which, um, annoyed the person who had entered it, oops. But still, it was indeed flags, and we managed to identify the rest. Some were obvious (Kazakhstan), but some took a while. I remember Emma figuring out Brazil and me being like oh man how did I miss that; she's also the one who got Lesotho. I remember I got Nauru. Marshall Islands gave us a fair bit of trouble; I think it was one of the people we were talking to who found it. Bosnia and Herzegovina we didn't get at all; at Daniels' suggestion, we ended up using Christmas Island (not really a country) instead, which did get us the right shape but not the right name to extract from. Still, even with the second letter wrong, it was clear what the answer had to be.
Exactly -- This one got kicked off with the first one, "chance of successfully navigating an asteroid field". I think this was originally marked down as 1/3720; I later changed it to just 3720 so we'd have integers. Then we realized they were in numerical order and it got changed back to 1/3720. I nitpickingly corrected it to 1/3721 -- which it turns out I was right about :P -- but this got changed back and I didn't bother fixing it further because it's not like it would affect the answer anyway. Similarly I messed up putting 525,600 rather than just 525,000 for "moments so dear", but again, it didn't matter; the puzzle writers anticipated both of these. They may not have anticipated our extra precision on Mrs. Whatsit's age, but, again, it didn't affect the answer.
Anyway yeah I did a bunch of the work on this one. We relied on a team member with Mathematica to do the final calculation; I initially tried to do it straight in Google Sheets, which, yeah, didn't work. (I didn't know about the issue with it not even giving the correct GCD with the emergency services number...) The person who did it in Mathematica was all prepared to go turning up precision as necessary but her initial attempted yielded the 14000605 we needed. Someone misidentified this as being from Doctor Who, but I pointed out they meant Doctor Strange, and we got the answer. :)
FedEx -- Ugh, this one. Daniel, Emma, and I solved the word search, and I noticed the FedEx arrows. But what I wrote down was the letter such arrows pointed to immediately, since, of course, we didn't know about the numbers yet. Then Daniel noticed the Konami code in there... but what do we do with that? None of us thought to try just entering it at that screen, so this didn't get solved until much later, by someone else.
Heart of the Cards -- Oh man, this one. I took a look at this one after other people had already done a lot of the work and were trying to figure out how to extract an answer. People couldn't figure out the correct way to perform the fusion, and, I couldn't either. I tried one or two things that hadn't been already, but none of it yielded a sensible answer. The real answer is not something I would have thought of at all. Someone else solved it later though.
Illiterate Programming -- I got to this one after the programming langauges had been identified and thought, hm, maybe it has to do with their respective comment characters? No, it didn't. Later people noticed the 26 words thing, but didn't know what to look for. Someone tried indexing into the sentences with the letters of "DONALD A KNUTH" (to which someone else pointed out, hey, his middle name is "Ervin"), which of course didn't yield anything. We didn't solve this one.
Magic Words -- I did some initial identification on this, but had no idea what to do after that, and much of what I wrote down was wrong. I remember someone else had to point out to me that that was the logo for Edge, not Internet Explorer. :P I also misidentified the raven with its head cut off as a crow wearing a scarf. Someone else put down "doe-shoe" for the deer initially, before other people pointed out that that is not a doe. I think the only ones I had right were "dig-well" and "shackle-cue". Other people solved this one later.
Musical Theater Guild -- An easy one! I and some other people filled out the Magic clues, while yet other people filled out the musical clues. I put Niv Mizzet instead of Ral Zarek because I didn't count, oops.
Namesake -- Oh, this is one I was pretty key in. I started out solving the clues up top, of course; I didn't know what the theme was, of course, so my first guess was that answers should be four letters. That didn't get corrected until later.
But, OK, what are the maps? I had no idea. One of them I thought was maybe New York Harbor (rotated), but on checking a map, no, it wasn't. Finally I was like, well, KOBE is a Japanese city, maybe I should take a look at that? And, bam, there it was. Oh look, that's route 21, I guess we put down a 1. So I guess we have to do the same thing with other cities... hey, these are all in Japan, aren't they? Problem is, identifying the maps is still hard. Fortunately someone who lives in Japan heard about this and came on and was able to identify the maps much more readily. We didn't even get them all (the TONE clue we never even solved) but the answer was looking like COSMOPOLITAN so we called that in.
Numbers -- I think I was unhelpful here by being like, let's get exact fractions, rather than just doing decimals... (the last one doesn't even repeat within the space given...) Anyway I ended up not really working on this one after doing some fraction conversions, so other people did this separately later and I didn't really help with it.
Paint -- Emma and I took a brief look at this and had no idea what was going on. Other people got it later.
Simplicity -- I didn't really work on this at all. I took a look at it when someone had already written down city names on the spreadsheet (aside from the last one), but without any reasoning given; I suspect at that point the only reasoning they had was, well, it basically looks right. I was basically like, yeah, that does look right, but what the hell's going on here? Daniel had the same reaction. Other people solved this later.
Stay Hydrated -- Oy.
The Lexicographer Looks After His Own -- I didn't work on this at all, it's just a nifty puzzle.
Things -- This one is also kind of amusing.
Tic Tac Toe -- I think it was Emma who noticed the three-in-a-row pattern. I remember we were stuck on the boats clue for a bit; we started looking a list of types of boats, and Emma was like, dinghies! And I go to put in "dinghy" and she's like, no, it's plural "dinghies" that works, and I was like, oh, whoa, nice.
Who's that Pokémon? -- Daniel, Emma, and I did a bunch on this one. The thing about identifying the images up top is that most of the time you really only needed to get one component to match it to a Pokemon, so this wasn't that hard. Although somehow at the end when I was like, OK we have to do something with the remaining two, and somehow didn't realize we could just combine them to get "Napoleon". :P I think this is partly because I was thinking of "Empoleon" as *already* being a combination with "Napoleon" being the back half, so the idea of combining it with something *else* to get "Napoleon" didn't feel right.
Burton-Conner Meta -- I looked at what we had so far and went looking for other BC answers, and some could indeed be rephrased that way, but none of the ones we had at the time fit; the one I remember was "ARCHIVED EDITIONS", which could be "BACK CATALOGUE" if only it fit. This wouldn't be solved until we had more info later.
Simmons Hall Meta -- I didn't work on this one at all, I just think this one was neat.
A Bit of Light -- Hoo boy, this one. When I got to this one, someone else had already noticed that the bytes could be read as Braille, although they only partly decoded it? I decoded the rest. There was a nonsense character after the word "HEX", but since the message thus far had clued to use Braille ASCII, I later identified that as a semicolon. Anyway, I then decoded the hex at the end to get "int=>hex=>SSD", but what to do from there?
I think it was Daniel who noticed that the colors were resistor code colors, but how to intepret them to get actual numbers? For quite a while, nobody got anywhere with this. I got tripped up by the fact that the violet looked pink to me, and, well, pink is a resistor code color, but it doesn't encode a digit, so that leads to problems. I gave up on this, and seemingly so did everyone else; it wasn't until quite a while later that I came back to this and saw that someone had written down all the colors in the spreadsheet and oh hey that's not pink that's violet.
Well, knowing that, that immediately suggested a path. I took the colors on each byte as decimal numbers and converted to hex as instructed. I initially messed this up by looking at columns instead of bytes, and then by reading each byte in the wrong order. Oops. But once I had the right order, I finally got things which clearly looked related to one another, and it was pretty simple to figure out how to convert each one to a seven-segment display hex digit. But this got us a confusing message: "DA7E 1919 07 22 CA5E 1310719A 432221707726202B7E7B1D076E". Someone suggested we flip it upside down, which I thought sounded like a good idea... fortunately someone else suggested the right answer -- that "DA7E" and "CA5E" were presumably "DATE" and "CASE" -- before we tried that. I did a bit of searching and found the patent referred to, and, with a bit of checking Wikipedia (not reading the patent itself!), learned that it was the patent on one-time pads. It was more specifically a patent on one-time pads using Baudot encoding, but, uh, we just xor'ed our two hex sequences together, which is what we were supposed to do. Someone else then converted to ASCII and extracted "LUMINESCENT" (I got tripped up by those 2A's on both ends...).
Bad Air Day -- I ended up doing this one by myself late at night when most people were asleep. I don't know anything about fashion, of course; the way I figured out that's what it was was by searching for things possibly related to the popcorn one. Of course once I found that the rest was fairly straightforward. Two of the fashion shows I couldn't figure out which plane matched, but, whatever, that was enough to get out "CATWALK FOR US".
Unfortunately, this was one of those puzzles where you have to do a thing afterward, and I wasn't about to do the thing. So we didn't actually get this one counted as solved until quite a while later. Ugh. I don't like this sort of thing. If I've solved the puzzle part of the puzzle, I want the puzzle to be solved! Why does there have to be a non-puzzle part of the puzzle?
Complexity Evaluation -- Oy, this one. I started this one off by trying to evaluate what complexity classes applied but I didn't always get it right. And it didn't occur to me to ask, which of these are known true vs known false vs unknown; I just asked, which are (known) true. Also, I missed at first that Problem 6 had the input in unary, which of course puts it in P/Poly (and apparently AC0, though I didn't catch that) despite being undecideable. But yeah, I had no idea what to do with that beyond this, and apparently neither did anyone else; we never ended up solving this one. I also apparently messed up a few of the complexity identifications, and I really had no idea what to do with AC0...
Dolphin -- I wish I'd tried to recruit Alex's help on this one, he's played so many GameCube games...
Harmony -- I tried to recruit Geoff with this one. :) He did not join though. I meant to work on this, but it seems at some point I forgot about it and never got back to it. Oops. So I have no idea how far we got with this one; we apparently didn't end up solving it though.
Successively More Abundant in Verbiage -- Oh man. I'm glad that other people figured out what was going on with this one because I sure didn't. I did help out with identifying one or two of the quotes and pictures. I'm not sure any of us got why the second drawing of each pair was worse; whoever matched them up in the spreadsheet actually matched up the shorter ones with the worse drawings, but since I'd thought to add a column for the letters from the paired ones, we still got the right answer by reading down that column!
Boggle Battle -- I helped out a bit with this one. First two levels are not too bad, but levels 3 and 4! The lack of diagonals on 3 is a killer, and 4 is made hard not only by the unintuitive graph but by the fact that letters typically have so few neighbors, so there just aren't a lot of options...
Divided Is Us -- Oh boy, this one. So, this one ran into a number of difficulties. Firstly, technical difficulties. Emma, Daniel, and I tried to do this together with Joia, another member of Plant, and got a few levels in; doing it without being able to see their screen was hard, but we managed for a bit, before finally Joia just shared her screen and it got easier. Unfortunately, Emma, who was Two, had to reload at one point, after which we found that none of us could get Two. Did someone else open it up, get Two, and then just leave the tab open or something? :-/ We thought about possibly asking HQ to kick our entire team out of there.
We eventually returned to this on Sunday, this time with Cassels as the fourth, as mentioned above, so we were all doing this from one place. This went better, although we did have to put in the spreadsheet that please if you are not one of the four people who are doing this please don't interfere! Fortunately eventually the interference stopped, and we managed to make it all the way to level 8.
Level 8, however, we couldn't beat. Indeed it seemed to be straightforwardly unsolveable. It turns out that there is a way of winning, but we couldn't find it and gave up. That didn't mean giving up on the puzzle, though! After all, maybe you weren't supposed to beat level 8; maybe at this point you were supposed to sit down and extract an answer.
In reality, this was a little off -- it was level 9 that was truly straightforwardly unsolveable (like, in level 9, you don't even have control, and one of the screens says "END"), and which clued the extraction. But we didn't know about level 9. We should have inferred its existence because, like, if they wanted to indicate that you should stop trying to win and extract, they'd do that overtly, not by giving you an impossible level. But given that our extraction efforts seemed to be working, we didn't.
Like, even without seeing the flag and dot clues in level 9, we still got the semaphore and Braille to spell out "SECOND GRAND". So is that the answer? "SECOND GRAND"? (Or "GRAND SECOND"?) No, it isn't. So what could be clued by "SECOND GRAND"?
A bit of searching yielded "Second Grand Constitution and Bylaws" and "Second Grand Alliance" as phrases starting with "second grand". So I tried both "Constitution and Bylaws" and "Alliance", but neither was correct. Now the actual answer, in fact, was "SECOND GRAND ALLIANCE"! And if I'd been thinking, there's more to the extraction that we don't know, what would complete "SECOND GRAND" to form an answer, then maybe I would have thought to submit that. But instead I was thinking of "SECOND GRAND" as the entire extracted message, and so instead was looking for what it clued, and omitted it from my answers.
Daniel did suggest that the player sprites might form part of the extraction -- which they do! -- but the problem is that without the info from Level 9, it's not really possible to get anywhere with that...
So yeah, despite coming so close, we never ended up solving this one. Blech.
You Will Explode If You Stop Talking -- Emma wanted to also do this one together, but we didn't end up doing it.
Untitled Goose Goals -- I ended up doing this one. There was some duplication of effort here, another team member started doing it after me, but I finished it first. Actually, funny thing, the NPC with the goose hat was covered by other sprites when I went to go talk to them so I couldn't actually see their appearance; so I didn't find them by their appearance, I just talked to arbitrary NPCs in Lobby 10 until one of them was the right one!
Mysterious Figures -- Hoo boy, this one. This one gave us a lot of trouble and we did not end up solving it. When I got to it, it had already been abandoned once. People had already figured out the puzzle's workings, but were having trouble completing it. Most of the non-Mr.-Men grid was filled out, but the Mr. Men grid was quite sparse, and someone had attempted the numerical puzzle but given up. I added two more answers to the non-Mr.-Men grid, but they were both wrong. For the "Back to the Future" one I put Mr. Fusion (which doesn't actually appear in the first movie, oops; I've never actually seen these movies) and for the strongest man in the world I put Mr. Satan. But neither of these fit the alphabetization constraint! Oops.
I actually did put Mr. Uppity in the correct spot for the Mr. Men clues, but later deleted it because, could that really be right? Tuns out, it was! But we just had so little of those filled out that we were just not close to solving this, especially with the numerical puzzle given up as well.
Questionable Answers -- Just kind of a neat puzzle. Imagine if Jeopardy! normally worked this way...
Connections -- Huh, I guess the clue answers were not in fact all four letters long. (I only worked on this briefly at the very start, and thought that the clue answers were all four letters long, which they weren't. (So e.g. instead of "BATTERY", I put "AAAA". :P ) The people who actually stuck around to work on this one did in fact solve it.)
Extensive -- I didn't work on this, though Emma did a bit. I just think this is an amusing puzzle.
Radical Rebuses -- This puzzle is surprisingly simple upon looking up the solution, but we got nowhere on it. Did our team not have people familiar with Chinese proverbs...? If I were back at Truth House I imagine Angus might have gotten this! Heh, if J.R. were solving with us that might have helped, but she's not really the sort for puzzles...
Treasure Maps -- This one of the two that got Alex to join. He identified most of the tile sets (we were missing one -- actually I think he had the right idea for that one two but we, uh, messed up some letter counts >_> ), but then we didn't really know what to do from there and got nowhere further on it.
Balancing Act -- I tried to help out with this one towards the very end. Other than solving the clues we had basically no idea what to do. We were also really stuck on the L clue. I almost put down "CHAUMURKY" for that. :P
Don't Get Eaten -- Wondering, just where was this Alchemist Sphinx? I don't think I found it.
Altered Beasts -- I remember some people thought that the 9 transformations corresponded to the 4 rows and 5 columns, so that each cell had exactly two of them. Turns out no. Anyway I didn't really end up helping with this one. Eventually it got solved though.
Game Ditty Quiz -- Hoo boy, this one. This was really the one that got Alex to join in. Video game musing and Games Done Quick, how could he not? :)
We identified most of the tracks without too much trouble, but a few we didn't recognize -- and of course, one, the 16-second one, was so sped-up as to be unrecognizeable. Alex managed to identify that one anyway by opening it up in Audacity and slowing it the hell down until it became identifiable as "Still Alive".
Meanwhile we also started identifying the runs. We had one or two of them wrong at first, but with the run time = track time * 60 constraint, we were able to get them all (although we had the wrong Mario Galaxy run for a bit due to me misreading the year on it; the time was a little off, but I ignored that until it led to a nonsensical answer later). We hadn't identified all the tracks beyond what game they came from, but, hey, seems the runs were what mattered, right?
Anyway, with the runs identified, we got "VG LEAD SHEETS", but what the hell do we do with that? We tried submitting it as the answer, but nope. (Just to be sure, since we hadn't fixed my Mario Galaxy mistake, we also tried submitting the mistaken version, "VG LEID SHEETS". :P )
Fortunately eventually I thought to try searching that, and, hey, turns out that's a website! So now we needed to go back and identify the remaining tracks so we could look them up there. Problem was, what to do with them?
I thought the flavor text was hinting that we should make use of the arranger/transcriber, so I put that down in the spreadsheet... but then what? I also put down the quarter-note value (don't know the correct term here), which turned out to be irrelevant. Someone else had to come in and provide the answer, that yup, you just index into the transcriber's name. I guess I didn't think of that since we'd already used those index numbers to index into the runner's name; the idea that they'd just reuse the same number somehow didn't occur to me.
Unfortunately, this got us the message "MAKE US A COVER", which... yup. Another one where we solved the puzzle part, and now would have to do a non-puzzle thing before it would count as solved. :-/ Neither of us were about to do this and we kicked it over to the rest of the team.
The next day still nobody had done this, so I suggested to Alex we could throw together something quickly. Alex decided to do something a bit higher-quality though, and also didn't really tell people he was doing this, so, uh, someone else on the team did end up doing this by the time he finished. Oh well.
Anyway, nifty puzzle, but man I am not liking these puzzles where you have to do a non-puzzle thing afterward. It's really just frustrating, to solve the puzzle but not receive credit for it until possibly like a day later.
Clusters Meta -- I came to this one where someone had noticed there was something of a Greek-Latin thing going on, but they didn't take it very far. They were like, SCRIPT -> GRAPH? MULTI -> POLY? ORTHO -> RECT? And that was pretty much it. I was like, hey, this can be taken much further, we can transform whole words! And so I started filling those in... "rectangular", "manufacture" (it was actually supposed to be "manufacturer" but whatever, the puzzle writers accounted for small variations like this), "epigraph", "polymer". Two of them gave us a bit of trouble... "carnivore" I originally turned into "sarcophage", which, um, is not a word (although it still would have worked!). I thought it was the name of a Magic card; I was thinking of Sarcomancy. It was Emma who pointed out that it could be "sarcophagus". The other troublesome one was "malformation". I originally put "cacomorph" for this. Again, not a word. At this early stage, I wasn't worrying too much about matching suffixes or parts of speech, as you can see. Emma later suggested "catamorphism", which at least is an actual word, but "cata" isn't a great match for "mal". It was someone else on the team who finally suggested "dys", and I was like, but "dysmorphism" isn't a word, until I was like "oh wait but dysmorphia" is, and there we go.
The rest of the feeder answers, unfortunately, we were missing, so it was hard to get much further. Well, OK -- had we realized what you were supposed to do, we could have gotten "__TR_ GL_SS_", which might have been helpful, but we didn't. What we did notice is that the first letters of the transformed words seemed to be leading towards "SPIDER WOMAN" -- you could get that by rearranging them and adding the correct number of extra letters -- so, as a guess, we tried submitting that. Since that wasn't it, we also tried "ARACHNE", and, at my suggestion, "WEBMISTRESS". But none of those worked, so yeah...
Clueless -- We realized this was a Hanabi puzzle, but that was about it. I didn't work on this one.
Ignorance -- I remember Emma spent quite a bit of time on this one. Ultimately we didn't end up solving it though.
Pitch Black -- I made an initial stab at recording what was going on in these rooms, but I missed a lot of it! We didn't end up solving this one.
The IMO Shortlist -- The country codes confused me on this one, because apparently the IMO uses its own three-letter country codes rather than the ISO ones. Someone else pointed this out when I was like, hey, these aren't all real country codes...
I didn't do much on this one. I solved A3 (although I got it wrong at first because it's been quite a while since I've had to think about Dirichlet convolutions or Möbius inversion!) and I fixed a teammate's incorrect answer to A6. But I didn't really help with the overall structure of the problem. We did solve it eventually.
And, I think that's it!
As for Mystery Hunt 2022, well, next year in Cambridge?
