"Out of nothing I have created a strange new universe."
-- János Bolyai
This past weekend was the MIT Mystery Hunt.
Mystery Hunt is a very large puzzle hunt. It's a little hard to describe puzzle hunts, but basically they're themed events in which teams compete by solving all kinds of puzzles. The answers to puzzles are always words or phrases (answers from this year's Hunt include DANNY OCEAN, GRAPHS, and AVENGERS), but how to arrive at that answer varies wildly. Most puzzles have two phases, a data-mining phase and an extraction phase. The data-mining phase could be answering the clues of a crossword or cryptic, identifying the missing letter on a bunch of road signs, looking at the rhyme scheme of a poem, doing some logic puzzles -- there are lots of possibilities. Extraction is getting from the data-mining to the answer. That could be indexing numbers into some words (taking the nth letter), looking at first letters of words, continuing a pattern, or looking at specially marked portions of a grid. A puzzle can be anything from a crossword with certain boxes marked so that those letters spell out the answer to a webpage full of pictures with no instructions at all.
