We won!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Finally, in like the 9th year that I've been hunting, the combined Random/Eleusian Nights team won the MIT IAP Mystery Hunt! It's just my luck that they'd wait for the first year that I wouldn't be around to enjoy the final stages of the runaround, but thanks to Random's massive Hunt infrastructure, I was able to contribute and feel like part of the team even from New Mexico.
The puzzles, complete with solutions, are listed here. There was a go puzzle this year, plus a couple of cryptics and a bridge puzzle in disguise. All in all, the puzzles were well written, as one would expect from Setec Astronomy, with a couple of exceptions, the largest being the orange super meta-puzzle. Unlike the other (super-)metas, this one involved information outside the scope of the orange round, and nothing clued that. Our team sat around nearly idle for 3/4 of a day(!) until Setec gave us a clue to this fact.
The puzzles, complete with solutions, are listed here. There was a go puzzle this year, plus a couple of cryptics and a bridge puzzle in disguise. All in all, the puzzles were well written, as one would expect from Setec Astronomy, with a couple of exceptions, the largest being the orange super meta-puzzle. Unlike the other (super-)metas, this one involved information outside the scope of the orange round, and nothing clued that. Our team sat around nearly idle for 3/4 of a day(!) until Setec gave us a clue to this fact.
2 Comments:
I'm glad you guys had fun with the Hunt, too.
If you have the time and inclination, take a closer look at the go puzzle. It's a bunch of pretty easy life-and-death problems. Getting the puzzle answer from it is pretty straightforward, too.
And I had to miss it this year :(
I maybe coulda helped a little on Friday and Saturday, remotely from NZ, if I had been thinking ... and less pre-occupied.
And my MIT account died on Jan 11th (unexpectedlty! I thought my professor has already vouched for my account for another year!). So I missed all the emails to random's team. I need to tell mcain to replace my mit address with my alum address.
Do I get to help write puzzles for next year? Or... should I join another team and play the hunt? I know a number of people on Setec... Is there a subset of Randoms who want to make a team instead of writing or test solving?
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