A Strange New Universe

"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.


When I say that Mystery Hunt is very large, I mean that there are hundreds of participants and over a hundred puzzles. It's not necessary to solve all the puzzles, though, because puzzle hunts also have structure. Some puzzles, called metas, use answers to previous puzzles, and it's usually possible to solve metas without solving all the associated previous puzzles. There can also be puzzles that use meta answers (called supermetas or meta-metas), and that pattern can continue. At the end of a hunt, teams that finish go on a run-around, which is some kind of physical activity very related to the theme of the hunt. The goal of Mystery Hunt is to find the coin, which is hidden somewhere on MIT's campus.

I had done some smaller (day long) puzzle hunts at Canada/USA Mathcamp, but I'd never been able to do Mystery Hunt -- I couldn't go up to MIT for a weekend in January, and I didn't think I was a good enough puzzler to make much progress remotely. So I was really excited to be able to participate this year.

The Mathcamp team, Manic Sages, won in 2012, which means they were writing this year's Hunt, so I couldn't hunt with Sages. Mathcamp faculty realized that there were Mathcampers who wanted to hunt but hadn't been able to hunt with Sages the year before, so they decided to put together a team. That team was Strange New Universe, after the quote by János Bolyai concerning his discovery of hyperbolic geometry (the quote has been on Mathcamp t-shirts since 2004). We were fairly small and inexperienced, but we had lots of fun.

The theme this year was a heist to recover the coin from an evil bank, Enigma Valley. The first round involved discovering who had helped build the bank's security system so that we could then recruit them to help us recover the coin. Each later round involved recruiting those people to the team.

I always love spending time with Mathcampers. I saw some people I hadn't seen since 2009 or 2010, met Mathcampers from the early to mid 2000s, and got to know some 2011 and 2012 campers, and we all did puzzles together. Spending several hours trying to make sense of a puzzle is a pretty wonderful way to bond. I definitely miss the other Strangers. Some Sages also came to visit, so I got to see even more Mathcampers!

I really liked the puzzles, too. Some of my favorite puzzles involved distorted movie titles, road signs missing letters and an MIT hack, stories with morals that are plays on common sayings, and Disney movies. The team favorite was probably the Time Conundrum, which led to exclamations like "The cucumber is fourteen years old!" (incorrect) and "My time machine is full of ducks!" (I think correct)

There's another reason I'll always remember this Mystery Hunt, though -- it broke a record. Sages inadvertently wrote the longest Mystery Hunt ever. Hunts usually end on Sunday afternoon, and Sages thought this one would, too... and then it ended on Monday afternoon. The coin was found something like 73 hours after the first set of puzzles dropped (were released), and that was with Sages liberally giving out hints and free answers, cutting a few puzzles, and deciding that teams only needed to solve five of the six main metas to go on the run-around. The team that won at long last has a team name much too long to put here, as it's the entire text of Atlas Shrugged.

Strange New Universe didn't solve a lot of puzzles, but we didn't expect to. Every time we made a break-through on a puzzle we got really excited, and I know that I'm a lot more confident in my puzzling abilities than I was before. I'm still inexperienced, but I know the kinds of puzzles I'm good at and the kinds with which I need more practice (oh my goodness cryptics). I won't be able to hunt onsite next year, but I might hunt remotely. I'm so excited about future hunting -- it really was something of a strange new universe.

All puzzles and solutions are here. Note that later puzzles contain spoilers for zeroth round puzzles.