Mystery Hunt Roundup 2025!
Jan. 30th, 2025 04:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sniffnoyYes solutions have been up for a while but I've been busy! Anyway, Mystery Hunt this year!
I once again went up to Boston for Mystery Hunt this year. Still on Plant.
The Hunt had an interesting structure this year. The first round had five different metapuzzles -- four ordinary metas and one supermeta, although I believe it was designed to be solvable without solving all of the other metas first -- and solving each one of the five unlocked a different subsequent round. Each of these later rounds had their own metapuzzle or metapuzzles, and solving the metapuzzles for all rounds unlocked the runaround. We made it to all five of the later rounds, but didn't solve any of their metas.
The other way the structure of the hunt was unusual was that, rather than solves unlocking specific puzzles, instead they separately "discovered" puzzles and gave you keys. You see, when you discovered a puzzle, it would still be locked -- they'd give you a name and a minimal description that they considered spoiler-free -- and you had to spend a key to unlock it. The idea was that this would allow teams to focus their efforts on the sort of puzzle that they prefer. I think this was a positive effect, but there was also a negative one. You know how clues and free solves require strong team leadership to make sure they get used? I think keys have a similar sort of thing going on. Without strong leadership a team might just not spend their keys and not unlock enough puzzles!
Also, one of the subsequent rounds this year was a fish round, and, I have mixed feelings about that. I mean, it's nice to have some easy puzzles, but they're so long, and it's kind of exhausting to solve so many puzzles and still not unlock the meta. If you want to have a fish round, maybe break it up into several rounds, rather than making it one long one?
The other reason I'm maybe a bit cool on fish rounds is that if there's always easy puzzles available, it becomes less appealing to sit down with the harder ones and stare at them and try lots of things. It's distracting! At least it's not like last year where, AIUI, the fish round barely contributed to progression... here at least it was a necessary part of making it to the runaround. But, yeah, if you want to have easier puzzles, maybe just mix them in with the other puzzles as an occasional "here have an easy one" rather than sticking them all in one round to make sure one's always available?
I'm actually a little unsure I helped all that much this year! I mean I definitely contributed to the team but I feel like I was often so distracted... well, I guess I'll go over the individual puzzles and see!
(Also: Li-Mei was on the writing team this year! Hi Li-Mei! :) )
An Argument: I didn't work on this puzzle at all, I just think it's neat.
Battle Factory: For a bit we thought that the descriptions at the bottom corresponded to Pokemon -- that "linguist" might clue Lickitung, for instance. Well, that wasn't correct at all.
Check-a-deez Words Out: Oh boy, this one. The flavor text clearly clues Donald Duck, and people quickly started finding birds in the word search. I think I may have been the one to suggest that we should find first names that went with the birds? Jack Sparrow, etc. Some of our initial guesses were wrong (we initially had Bella Swan and Frasier Crane rather than Emma Swan and Ichabod Crane) but with the enumeration we figured it out (some people were confused that there were 24 enumerations but only 12 birds but I was like, we have to take the first names and last names together and fit them in there!).
We were stuck there for a bit but someone else (I don't remember who) started finding the other names in the grid (but bent, as clued by the flavor text) and from the intersections we pulled out the message FORENAME RYAN. Well, this puzzle is all about people with bird last names, so it must be Ryan GOSLING, right? Nope.
At Wrap-Up they revealed that this was the puzzle that got the most wrong answers, and that GOSLING was the second-most common one (RYAN GOSLING being the third-most common). What you had to do was notice that the first names in the grid formed the shape of a flamingo, so the answer was the soccer player RYAN FLAMINGO. Yikes. (Apparently FLAMINGO on its own was the most common wrong answer.) That was a nasty ending there!
Drunkens and Flagons: Oh boy, I joined this one after they'd solved the first part and got the receipt, and I got nowhere. I didn't even think to go over the original text. That's the thing about joining a puzzle late, sometimes you gotta do that!
On the Corner: I got REFRESH for MH5, but then assumed it was a clue to something further, when it wasn't! (I failed to notice that the left-hand-side of the equation spelled out "answer"...) Anyway yeah we were stuck on this one for quite a while due to the whole problem of MH1-4 being hidden...
Zing It Again: This was a confusing puzzle. I helped solve, uh... one of the clues.
The Jewelry Store: It took us a surprisingly long time to extract an answer after filling in the rings. I didn't figure it out. It's weird because it's so simple! But we didn't try enough variants I guess, I certainly didn't...
The Casino: I helped figure out a little bit of what was going on with this one!
The Art Gallery: Oh boy this one, we took way too long on this. I feel like on certain other puzzles I fell down by forgetting that like... hey this is Mystery Hunt you gotta try everything. On this one by contrast I fell down by forgetting, sometimes when an approach doesn't work, it's not because it was the wrong approach -- it's because you fed bad data in and you need to recheck (or just go ahead with the rest even if that one data point would seem to rule out the approach).
So like -- we had a lot of this puzzle, but were stuck on what to do with the extracted bytes. And yeah we tried Latin-1 but that didn't seem to yield anything. Except actually that was the answer. What went wrong? Well, the person who entered Lavender just put in the first Lavender they found, Lavender (I) as Wikipedia calls it, without noticing that there was a second one and it's the second one that's current. I actually did notice the two Lavenders (and that II was the current one) when trying out a different idea we had, but never thought to check that the person who put in the color code put in the right one. Oops. With the wrong lavender, Latin-1 yielded a control character, which we initially took to mean this was the wrong approach, when actually we just needed to recheck what we had, or try the rest anyway. Oops.
A Math Quiz: I didn't work on this one at all, it's just a neat puzzle.
Be Mine: Well this was certainly an easy one (I mean yeah it was in the fish round, but even so it was easy). Although we were stuck for a short time before Daniel (I think it was him?) noticed the numerals; we did briefly go down a dead-end of finding love interests for the characters named "Valentine" that we found. Someone put Leon Kennedy for Jill Valentine, I was like I don't think that's right... anyway that had nothing to do with the correct answer.
Commentary: Just another cool puzzle.
Dear Diary: I helped a little at the beginning of this one, but I missed a bunch of the missing letters...
Fight Night at Mo's: Another one we got pretty quickly, although for a bit we thought it had to do with actual boxing -- on the image that's supposed to clue "Orthoclase [feldspar]", someone had filled in "Gaseous Clay? (Cassius Clay)". But yeah that wasn't it.
It's not clear: Oy, this one. We got quite stuck on extraction for a while. We got as far as "ORIGINAL CHIAT DAY SYMBOL SEVEN FIVE", but what on earth does that mean? I completely didn't realize that "SEVEN FIVE" was an enumeration. I at least was stuck on thinking it had to do with the original Chiat/Day building, aka the Binoculars Building. So I thought, "original Chiat Day" -- that clues binoculars; "symbol 75", well decimal 75 in ASCII is "K", so what does a K symbol mean on binoculars? This was not at all the way to go, though.
Lab Scrabble: Oh man I'm disappointed I missed this puzzle!
Mellow Planet: This was a neat little puzzle that I helped out a fair bit on (I remember I suggested that the woodpecker was the "morse code sparrow"). Before we figured out how to pair the left and right sides I made the mistake of pairing some right sides with other right sides; obviously wrong, I know, but it jumped out at me first. Like "unicorn sweater" ("What's a unicorn sweater?" "A sweater with a unicorn on it!")
Men's At My Nose: This one was pretty easy. Not sure I actually filled any of this in except for "genius loci".
Some Assembly Required: Helped a bit solving this one, not much to say about it.
Taste Explosion: Hoo boy this one, I spent a bunch of time on this one. This was Sunday, so after the coin was found. Initially I had no idea what to do, so I ran it through a word search finder, and what it found made the theme pretty clear -- Lay's potato chip flavors.
Unfortunately I got a bit confounded -- there are 15 flavors to find, but I missed one; and I also sort of found two that weren't actually there and that I wasn't sure what to do with. See, one of the flavors was "Game Day Chili", and I didn't find that one, because one of the other flavors was "Sweet Chili Heat". "Chili" came up in the word search solver, and I spotted the one in "Sweet Chili Heat", but I didn't notice there were actually two -- and since neither "Game" nor "Day" are food-related words, I just completely missed that one.
Meanwhile, not using the word-search solver, just by eye, I spotted two more flavors in the grid that weren't in straight lines. I wasn't sure what to do with these since they weren't in straight lines; turns out they really were there, just they were for the second half of the puzzle! The two I had were "crispy taco" and "sandwich" -- that second one is incomplete, it should be "BLT sandwich". Anyway I figured "crispy taco" was probably correct (it was a real flavor) and so I put it in. Which wasn't the right thing to do.
This somewhat messed up matching the bag colors, which was a little tricky already due to all the red bags, whose colors were all pretty similar. I got most of them right I'm pretty sure, but if one of your flavors is wrong you can mess it up!
One of the annoying things about this puzzle of course is that there does not seem to exist any complete online reference for Lay's flavors. The solution page mentions laysaroundtheworld.com as helpful, and I certainly found that website while solving, but the thing about it is, when I tried to load it in Firefox, I got a certificate error! And it forced HTTPS, no HTTP allowed. Only after the hunt did I think to try it in Chromium and see that Chromium will load it just fine...
Anyway, I had no idea what to do after matching the paint splashes to flavors -- I completely missed the significance of the blanks -- so I never made it to the second part on this one. I think someone else finished it later.
The Ultimate Insult: Quite easy one, when I got here someone had already done most of it but was having trouble with the final part. They had characters and "up", "down", or "side" for each, but were trying to fill in names for *all* the characters' moves in the given direction... I was just like, no, you should just do the special moves. Oops! Fortunately Tracy realized it should be the taunts instead! (Note that the person who'd tried to fill in all the moves actually *didn't* include the taunts, because they were going by move names, which taunts don't have (most normals don't have them either...).) So I filled those in pretty quick and finished it -- my sole advantage here was basically knowing that the website for this stuff is ssbwiki. :P (Whoever figured out the characters had used some other site with much less information to get the roster...)
Whose Song Is It Anyway?: A bunch of us did this one together late in the hunt. I actually completely missed that the enumerations were marked as music or lyrics, I thought they were just mixed together... I missed the significance of some of them being below the staff. Also yes we were all surprised to learn that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was originally from a musical. (We were also surprised at the inclusion of "Ironic", which definitely is not originally from a musical, but it's in one, so...)
Word Yore: Another one a bunch of us did together late in the hunt, also a pretty easy one. I remember one person was pretty disgusted by the phrase "rims of face hole". :P
TownSquareSpace: I helped a little identifying letters for this one. I remember there was some problem at first solving the Sudoku here, I guess because we misidentified some things? I remember we initially put L for the tombstone+keyboard (L for loss), rather than F (obvious in hindsight). We might have also had the baseball hit wrong? Like we were thinking about "what team is this guy" instead.
Bar Talk: I didn't work on this puzzle, I remember Emma spent a bunch of time on it though...
Do The Manual Calculations (Don't Try Monte Carlo): So this one confused me, it turns out because there are some basic facts about Markov Chains I was unaware of. Like, I was aware of the ergodic theorem, but I wasn't aware that you don't need aperiodicity for the stable distribution to be unique, you only need that for convergence. Oops! I was just confused because the very first example is periodic. I also didn't know that the expected time to return to a state is the reciprocal of its probability in the stable distribution. Well, good to know! Not clear on how much all of this applies when things aren't finite and there can be null recurrent states? Well, I assume that the infinite boards in this puzzle are well-behaved ones... anyway yeah I didn't end up working on this because of that confusion...
Eponymous Forensic Accountant: Ugh, this one. I helped with the initial part, doing a decent chunk of the law identification. But what to do after that? Trying to fit things into the enumeration barely worked. Well, it was late Saturday night and we were basically stopping for the night, so I left it. When I came back Sunday after the coin was found, I learned it had been solved, and oh boy is that solution something... (EDIT Feb 3: I forgot to mention, for a bit we thought maybe it mattered which ones had "law" in the name, maybe the ones with being victims and the others being suspects... yeah that wasn't right.)
Follow the Rules: Man, I was so off-track on this one initially -- focusing on what the buttons do rather than what the condition is for each output on the right. Silly me, that's not how a product space decomposes! I came back to this one much later after most of the rules had been figured out, with only 8 and 9 remaining. (Interestingly, rule number 2 had been solved, but in terms of a lookup table on the central column; we (myself included) didn't understand what the rule actually meant.)
8 was a real stumper -- people had noticed what happened when you had a complete column, I pointed out that a complete row had the same effect... but so many other things were just confusing. An X affected it? A diamond affected it? So much just didn't make sense! Someone else eventually got it much later after some hints I think.
As for 9, that was another case where we had a lookup table, except we knew it wasn't right. It was a lookup table based on the maxima of the 3 columns, but that didn't always determine it! Looking at the solution now, I see it's based on the sum, not the maximum. At the time I didn't know that though, and produced a corrected lookup table... based on the sum of the first column, but the maximum of the other two. I was so sure this was right, but oops, no it wasn't. Anyway we eventually solved this puzzle somehow, I think...
(Also, an annoyance: People kept referring to this puzzle as being about a "finite state machine". No, it's just a plain deterministic function! Oy...)
The Inspectre: I didn't work on this one but I thought it was amusing. (Also, wow, it took a long time...) Cassels collected the tile after the hunt, saying he intends to give them to Beren... possibly in a spring-loaded box. :P
ಕಾಬವದೋೀ್: Interesting puzzle. I contributed, like, a tiny amount to the first step. :P
He Shouldn't Have Eaten The Apple: Ugh, this one was a real stumper. I was able to identify, like, one or two sites, but without knowing the show I was not going to get anywhere.
Kindred Spirits: Oh boy this one. A sticking point on this one for quite a while was solving the last few clues. I remember I got the last two, DEMOCRAT and CAMPFIRE SOUR. I remember I also filled in RADIATION earlier... but I also got one of them wrong, putting GOLDEN BEAR for the panda clue because it was the only bear-related cocktail name I could find that fit the enumeration. Oops! This error stood for quite a while because nobody was able to figure out MONASTERY for some time.
Celestial Rope: We unlocked this Sunday night during our round of "let's unlock all the physical puzzles before HQ closes". When I saw it I was like, is this about the Sweden Solar System? Mostly no, but a little yes! I tried to help a little with this one but mostly got nowhere. I tried to do "Chemin de l'Observatoire", and hit upon Mont Megantic, but I was not able to find any information saying they had a model solar system! Also I think we missed that we could identify the planets based on the distance along the ribbon, oops.
Like there was some argument over whether the MIT one was Pluto or Neptune -- it sure seemed like Pluto, but, we already had a Pluto, so it had to be Neptune, right? Well apparently our other Pluto was wrong because it was Pluto. We were going to have someone actually go over to 8-322 to check, but were spared this when we found a video online demonstrating that it's Pluto. Anyway I don't think we solved this one.
(A Puzzle of the Dead) -- I asked for this one to be unlocked, being like, hey, this must relate to "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)"! Problem is I actually knew very little about that work. :P I ended up doing very little work on this one.
The clues coming from rearranging the initial poem were actually not helpful at all because we didn't figure out the deinterleaving until after we'd already figured out most of the rest of the puzzle -- we'd already gotten as far as putting together the megapoem, the problem was that we didn't know what to do next. Something to do with rhyme schemes, likely, but what?
I guess the answer was ultimately pretty simple -- just write out the rhyme scheme of the megapoem -- but people kind of gave up on it because it didn't appear to be going anywhere. Turns out you have to do the whole tedious thing to get the message!
An amusing recurring suggestion with this one was that, because the puzzle spoke of rhyme scheme, and the puzzle's name was in parentheses, that it had something to do with LISP. It did not. I had to explain to people where the parentheses actually came from.
Jargon: I don't think any of us knew about the game this was based on and cluing (we did not pick up on those hints), but fortunately this was pretty doable anyway (although some clues took quite a while and a few people staring at them). I actually helped out a fair bit with this one. We didn't get to the blacklight version because as mentioned we never solved any of the later round metas.
I remember early on on this one I was like "hey are these resistor colors"? And then later I was like oh no I guess they're not (because brown, green, and gray were missing, and cream isn't a resistor color). Then it turned out they were resistor colors after all!
Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em: I said we didn't get to the blacklight puzzles, but I think for this one because we unlocked its so late Sunday night they gave us a blacklight anyway? I don't think someone just had that on hand...
Give This Grid A Shake: We figured out pretty quickly what was going on here and solved the clues (I helped out with this part), but then actually assembling the Boggle board turned out to be really hard! Like, just the 4x4 I mean; once we got the 4x4 the 6x6 fell quickly (I helped with that too). My attempt at the 4x4 was pretty close but I wasn't able to quite get it and ultimately it took quite a while longer...
OK and I think that's all I have to say about this year!
Next year I think I might go to the JMM because it'll be in Washington DC, so I'll probably stay home for Mystery Hunt and solve remotely. But we'll see...
-Harry
I once again went up to Boston for Mystery Hunt this year. Still on Plant.
The Hunt had an interesting structure this year. The first round had five different metapuzzles -- four ordinary metas and one supermeta, although I believe it was designed to be solvable without solving all of the other metas first -- and solving each one of the five unlocked a different subsequent round. Each of these later rounds had their own metapuzzle or metapuzzles, and solving the metapuzzles for all rounds unlocked the runaround. We made it to all five of the later rounds, but didn't solve any of their metas.
The other way the structure of the hunt was unusual was that, rather than solves unlocking specific puzzles, instead they separately "discovered" puzzles and gave you keys. You see, when you discovered a puzzle, it would still be locked -- they'd give you a name and a minimal description that they considered spoiler-free -- and you had to spend a key to unlock it. The idea was that this would allow teams to focus their efforts on the sort of puzzle that they prefer. I think this was a positive effect, but there was also a negative one. You know how clues and free solves require strong team leadership to make sure they get used? I think keys have a similar sort of thing going on. Without strong leadership a team might just not spend their keys and not unlock enough puzzles!
Also, one of the subsequent rounds this year was a fish round, and, I have mixed feelings about that. I mean, it's nice to have some easy puzzles, but they're so long, and it's kind of exhausting to solve so many puzzles and still not unlock the meta. If you want to have a fish round, maybe break it up into several rounds, rather than making it one long one?
The other reason I'm maybe a bit cool on fish rounds is that if there's always easy puzzles available, it becomes less appealing to sit down with the harder ones and stare at them and try lots of things. It's distracting! At least it's not like last year where, AIUI, the fish round barely contributed to progression... here at least it was a necessary part of making it to the runaround. But, yeah, if you want to have easier puzzles, maybe just mix them in with the other puzzles as an occasional "here have an easy one" rather than sticking them all in one round to make sure one's always available?
I'm actually a little unsure I helped all that much this year! I mean I definitely contributed to the team but I feel like I was often so distracted... well, I guess I'll go over the individual puzzles and see!
(Also: Li-Mei was on the writing team this year! Hi Li-Mei! :) )
An Argument: I didn't work on this puzzle at all, I just think it's neat.
Battle Factory: For a bit we thought that the descriptions at the bottom corresponded to Pokemon -- that "linguist" might clue Lickitung, for instance. Well, that wasn't correct at all.
Check-a-deez Words Out: Oh boy, this one. The flavor text clearly clues Donald Duck, and people quickly started finding birds in the word search. I think I may have been the one to suggest that we should find first names that went with the birds? Jack Sparrow, etc. Some of our initial guesses were wrong (we initially had Bella Swan and Frasier Crane rather than Emma Swan and Ichabod Crane) but with the enumeration we figured it out (some people were confused that there were 24 enumerations but only 12 birds but I was like, we have to take the first names and last names together and fit them in there!).
We were stuck there for a bit but someone else (I don't remember who) started finding the other names in the grid (but bent, as clued by the flavor text) and from the intersections we pulled out the message FORENAME RYAN. Well, this puzzle is all about people with bird last names, so it must be Ryan GOSLING, right? Nope.
At Wrap-Up they revealed that this was the puzzle that got the most wrong answers, and that GOSLING was the second-most common one (RYAN GOSLING being the third-most common). What you had to do was notice that the first names in the grid formed the shape of a flamingo, so the answer was the soccer player RYAN FLAMINGO. Yikes. (Apparently FLAMINGO on its own was the most common wrong answer.) That was a nasty ending there!
Drunkens and Flagons: Oh boy, I joined this one after they'd solved the first part and got the receipt, and I got nowhere. I didn't even think to go over the original text. That's the thing about joining a puzzle late, sometimes you gotta do that!
On the Corner: I got REFRESH for MH5, but then assumed it was a clue to something further, when it wasn't! (I failed to notice that the left-hand-side of the equation spelled out "answer"...) Anyway yeah we were stuck on this one for quite a while due to the whole problem of MH1-4 being hidden...
Zing It Again: This was a confusing puzzle. I helped solve, uh... one of the clues.
The Jewelry Store: It took us a surprisingly long time to extract an answer after filling in the rings. I didn't figure it out. It's weird because it's so simple! But we didn't try enough variants I guess, I certainly didn't...
The Casino: I helped figure out a little bit of what was going on with this one!
The Art Gallery: Oh boy this one, we took way too long on this. I feel like on certain other puzzles I fell down by forgetting that like... hey this is Mystery Hunt you gotta try everything. On this one by contrast I fell down by forgetting, sometimes when an approach doesn't work, it's not because it was the wrong approach -- it's because you fed bad data in and you need to recheck (or just go ahead with the rest even if that one data point would seem to rule out the approach).
So like -- we had a lot of this puzzle, but were stuck on what to do with the extracted bytes. And yeah we tried Latin-1 but that didn't seem to yield anything. Except actually that was the answer. What went wrong? Well, the person who entered Lavender just put in the first Lavender they found, Lavender (I) as Wikipedia calls it, without noticing that there was a second one and it's the second one that's current. I actually did notice the two Lavenders (and that II was the current one) when trying out a different idea we had, but never thought to check that the person who put in the color code put in the right one. Oops. With the wrong lavender, Latin-1 yielded a control character, which we initially took to mean this was the wrong approach, when actually we just needed to recheck what we had, or try the rest anyway. Oops.
A Math Quiz: I didn't work on this one at all, it's just a neat puzzle.
Be Mine: Well this was certainly an easy one (I mean yeah it was in the fish round, but even so it was easy). Although we were stuck for a short time before Daniel (I think it was him?) noticed the numerals; we did briefly go down a dead-end of finding love interests for the characters named "Valentine" that we found. Someone put Leon Kennedy for Jill Valentine, I was like I don't think that's right... anyway that had nothing to do with the correct answer.
Commentary: Just another cool puzzle.
Dear Diary: I helped a little at the beginning of this one, but I missed a bunch of the missing letters...
Fight Night at Mo's: Another one we got pretty quickly, although for a bit we thought it had to do with actual boxing -- on the image that's supposed to clue "Orthoclase [feldspar]", someone had filled in "Gaseous Clay? (Cassius Clay)". But yeah that wasn't it.
It's not clear: Oy, this one. We got quite stuck on extraction for a while. We got as far as "ORIGINAL CHIAT DAY SYMBOL SEVEN FIVE", but what on earth does that mean? I completely didn't realize that "SEVEN FIVE" was an enumeration. I at least was stuck on thinking it had to do with the original Chiat/Day building, aka the Binoculars Building. So I thought, "original Chiat Day" -- that clues binoculars; "symbol 75", well decimal 75 in ASCII is "K", so what does a K symbol mean on binoculars? This was not at all the way to go, though.
Lab Scrabble: Oh man I'm disappointed I missed this puzzle!
Mellow Planet: This was a neat little puzzle that I helped out a fair bit on (I remember I suggested that the woodpecker was the "morse code sparrow"). Before we figured out how to pair the left and right sides I made the mistake of pairing some right sides with other right sides; obviously wrong, I know, but it jumped out at me first. Like "unicorn sweater" ("What's a unicorn sweater?" "A sweater with a unicorn on it!")
Men's At My Nose: This one was pretty easy. Not sure I actually filled any of this in except for "genius loci".
Some Assembly Required: Helped a bit solving this one, not much to say about it.
Taste Explosion: Hoo boy this one, I spent a bunch of time on this one. This was Sunday, so after the coin was found. Initially I had no idea what to do, so I ran it through a word search finder, and what it found made the theme pretty clear -- Lay's potato chip flavors.
Unfortunately I got a bit confounded -- there are 15 flavors to find, but I missed one; and I also sort of found two that weren't actually there and that I wasn't sure what to do with. See, one of the flavors was "Game Day Chili", and I didn't find that one, because one of the other flavors was "Sweet Chili Heat". "Chili" came up in the word search solver, and I spotted the one in "Sweet Chili Heat", but I didn't notice there were actually two -- and since neither "Game" nor "Day" are food-related words, I just completely missed that one.
Meanwhile, not using the word-search solver, just by eye, I spotted two more flavors in the grid that weren't in straight lines. I wasn't sure what to do with these since they weren't in straight lines; turns out they really were there, just they were for the second half of the puzzle! The two I had were "crispy taco" and "sandwich" -- that second one is incomplete, it should be "BLT sandwich". Anyway I figured "crispy taco" was probably correct (it was a real flavor) and so I put it in. Which wasn't the right thing to do.
This somewhat messed up matching the bag colors, which was a little tricky already due to all the red bags, whose colors were all pretty similar. I got most of them right I'm pretty sure, but if one of your flavors is wrong you can mess it up!
One of the annoying things about this puzzle of course is that there does not seem to exist any complete online reference for Lay's flavors. The solution page mentions laysaroundtheworld.com as helpful, and I certainly found that website while solving, but the thing about it is, when I tried to load it in Firefox, I got a certificate error! And it forced HTTPS, no HTTP allowed. Only after the hunt did I think to try it in Chromium and see that Chromium will load it just fine...
Anyway, I had no idea what to do after matching the paint splashes to flavors -- I completely missed the significance of the blanks -- so I never made it to the second part on this one. I think someone else finished it later.
The Ultimate Insult: Quite easy one, when I got here someone had already done most of it but was having trouble with the final part. They had characters and "up", "down", or "side" for each, but were trying to fill in names for *all* the characters' moves in the given direction... I was just like, no, you should just do the special moves. Oops! Fortunately Tracy realized it should be the taunts instead! (Note that the person who'd tried to fill in all the moves actually *didn't* include the taunts, because they were going by move names, which taunts don't have (most normals don't have them either...).) So I filled those in pretty quick and finished it -- my sole advantage here was basically knowing that the website for this stuff is ssbwiki. :P (Whoever figured out the characters had used some other site with much less information to get the roster...)
Whose Song Is It Anyway?: A bunch of us did this one together late in the hunt. I actually completely missed that the enumerations were marked as music or lyrics, I thought they were just mixed together... I missed the significance of some of them being below the staff. Also yes we were all surprised to learn that "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" was originally from a musical. (We were also surprised at the inclusion of "Ironic", which definitely is not originally from a musical, but it's in one, so...)
Word Yore: Another one a bunch of us did together late in the hunt, also a pretty easy one. I remember one person was pretty disgusted by the phrase "rims of face hole". :P
TownSquareSpace: I helped a little identifying letters for this one. I remember there was some problem at first solving the Sudoku here, I guess because we misidentified some things? I remember we initially put L for the tombstone+keyboard (L for loss), rather than F (obvious in hindsight). We might have also had the baseball hit wrong? Like we were thinking about "what team is this guy" instead.
Bar Talk: I didn't work on this puzzle, I remember Emma spent a bunch of time on it though...
Do The Manual Calculations (Don't Try Monte Carlo): So this one confused me, it turns out because there are some basic facts about Markov Chains I was unaware of. Like, I was aware of the ergodic theorem, but I wasn't aware that you don't need aperiodicity for the stable distribution to be unique, you only need that for convergence. Oops! I was just confused because the very first example is periodic. I also didn't know that the expected time to return to a state is the reciprocal of its probability in the stable distribution. Well, good to know! Not clear on how much all of this applies when things aren't finite and there can be null recurrent states? Well, I assume that the infinite boards in this puzzle are well-behaved ones... anyway yeah I didn't end up working on this because of that confusion...
Eponymous Forensic Accountant: Ugh, this one. I helped with the initial part, doing a decent chunk of the law identification. But what to do after that? Trying to fit things into the enumeration barely worked. Well, it was late Saturday night and we were basically stopping for the night, so I left it. When I came back Sunday after the coin was found, I learned it had been solved, and oh boy is that solution something... (EDIT Feb 3: I forgot to mention, for a bit we thought maybe it mattered which ones had "law" in the name, maybe the ones with being victims and the others being suspects... yeah that wasn't right.)
Follow the Rules: Man, I was so off-track on this one initially -- focusing on what the buttons do rather than what the condition is for each output on the right. Silly me, that's not how a product space decomposes! I came back to this one much later after most of the rules had been figured out, with only 8 and 9 remaining. (Interestingly, rule number 2 had been solved, but in terms of a lookup table on the central column; we (myself included) didn't understand what the rule actually meant.)
8 was a real stumper -- people had noticed what happened when you had a complete column, I pointed out that a complete row had the same effect... but so many other things were just confusing. An X affected it? A diamond affected it? So much just didn't make sense! Someone else eventually got it much later after some hints I think.
As for 9, that was another case where we had a lookup table, except we knew it wasn't right. It was a lookup table based on the maxima of the 3 columns, but that didn't always determine it! Looking at the solution now, I see it's based on the sum, not the maximum. At the time I didn't know that though, and produced a corrected lookup table... based on the sum of the first column, but the maximum of the other two. I was so sure this was right, but oops, no it wasn't. Anyway we eventually solved this puzzle somehow, I think...
(Also, an annoyance: People kept referring to this puzzle as being about a "finite state machine". No, it's just a plain deterministic function! Oy...)
The Inspectre: I didn't work on this one but I thought it was amusing. (Also, wow, it took a long time...) Cassels collected the tile after the hunt, saying he intends to give them to Beren... possibly in a spring-loaded box. :P
ಕಾಬವದೋೀ್: Interesting puzzle. I contributed, like, a tiny amount to the first step. :P
He Shouldn't Have Eaten The Apple: Ugh, this one was a real stumper. I was able to identify, like, one or two sites, but without knowing the show I was not going to get anywhere.
Kindred Spirits: Oh boy this one. A sticking point on this one for quite a while was solving the last few clues. I remember I got the last two, DEMOCRAT and CAMPFIRE SOUR. I remember I also filled in RADIATION earlier... but I also got one of them wrong, putting GOLDEN BEAR for the panda clue because it was the only bear-related cocktail name I could find that fit the enumeration. Oops! This error stood for quite a while because nobody was able to figure out MONASTERY for some time.
Celestial Rope: We unlocked this Sunday night during our round of "let's unlock all the physical puzzles before HQ closes". When I saw it I was like, is this about the Sweden Solar System? Mostly no, but a little yes! I tried to help a little with this one but mostly got nowhere. I tried to do "Chemin de l'Observatoire", and hit upon Mont Megantic, but I was not able to find any information saying they had a model solar system! Also I think we missed that we could identify the planets based on the distance along the ribbon, oops.
Like there was some argument over whether the MIT one was Pluto or Neptune -- it sure seemed like Pluto, but, we already had a Pluto, so it had to be Neptune, right? Well apparently our other Pluto was wrong because it was Pluto. We were going to have someone actually go over to 8-322 to check, but were spared this when we found a video online demonstrating that it's Pluto. Anyway I don't think we solved this one.
(A Puzzle of the Dead) -- I asked for this one to be unlocked, being like, hey, this must relate to "Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)"! Problem is I actually knew very little about that work. :P I ended up doing very little work on this one.
The clues coming from rearranging the initial poem were actually not helpful at all because we didn't figure out the deinterleaving until after we'd already figured out most of the rest of the puzzle -- we'd already gotten as far as putting together the megapoem, the problem was that we didn't know what to do next. Something to do with rhyme schemes, likely, but what?
I guess the answer was ultimately pretty simple -- just write out the rhyme scheme of the megapoem -- but people kind of gave up on it because it didn't appear to be going anywhere. Turns out you have to do the whole tedious thing to get the message!
An amusing recurring suggestion with this one was that, because the puzzle spoke of rhyme scheme, and the puzzle's name was in parentheses, that it had something to do with LISP. It did not. I had to explain to people where the parentheses actually came from.
Jargon: I don't think any of us knew about the game this was based on and cluing (we did not pick up on those hints), but fortunately this was pretty doable anyway (although some clues took quite a while and a few people staring at them). I actually helped out a fair bit with this one. We didn't get to the blacklight version because as mentioned we never solved any of the later round metas.
I remember early on on this one I was like "hey are these resistor colors"? And then later I was like oh no I guess they're not (because brown, green, and gray were missing, and cream isn't a resistor color). Then it turned out they were resistor colors after all!
Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em: I said we didn't get to the blacklight puzzles, but I think for this one because we unlocked its so late Sunday night they gave us a blacklight anyway? I don't think someone just had that on hand...
Give This Grid A Shake: We figured out pretty quickly what was going on here and solved the clues (I helped out with this part), but then actually assembling the Boggle board turned out to be really hard! Like, just the 4x4 I mean; once we got the 4x4 the 6x6 fell quickly (I helped with that too). My attempt at the 4x4 was pretty close but I wasn't able to quite get it and ultimately it took quite a while longer...
OK and I think that's all I have to say about this year!
Next year I think I might go to the JMM because it'll be in Washington DC, so I'll probably stay home for Mystery Hunt and solve remotely. But we'll see...
-Harry
