{"id":3328,"date":"2013-01-25T19:50:32","date_gmt":"2013-01-25T23:50:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/sj\/?p=3328"},"modified":"2013-02-20T18:53:35","modified_gmt":"2013-02-20T22:53:35","slug":"mystery-hunting-2013-pulling-off-an-epic-coin-heist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/2013\/01\/25\/mystery-hunting-2013-pulling-off-an-epic-coin-heist\/","title":{"rendered":"Mystery Hunting, 2013: Pulling off an epic Coin Heist"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mystery Hunt 2013 pitted teams against\u00a0Enigma Valley<\/a>\u00a0to\u00a0rescue the Hunt coins from a vault<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As usual, it was full of some of the best puzzle ideas in the world. \u00a0Moreso than usual, in fact: it was epic by the Hunt’s own standards – the largest hunt ever produced, with 150 puzzles, most roughly half again the size, complexity, and difficulty of traditional Mystery Hunt puzzles. \u00a0The variety of clever ideas in both individual puzzles and meta structure was impressive, alternating between rewarding and confusing. \u00a0Some puzzles realized a beautiful concept that other teams (including Codex and Metaphys) had considered when writing previous hunts, but not pulled off. \u00a0Some were built around a conceptual encoding whose very idea was \u00a0beautiful — an infinite cryptogram, a fractal word-search, purely group-theoretical encodings, a puzzle tracing out Feynman diagrams, a regular-expression ‘crossword<\/a>‘, a Chaotic language-evolution analysis, a real-life Enigma puzzle complete with figuring out how to properly construct your own machine… a safe door you had to get around by climbing through ducts…\u00a0a life-size Laser Maze worthy of its own Zone. \u00a0The heist team we recruited was brought to life in character, including Indy, Maxwell Smart, and Ern\u0151 Rubik. \u00a0The parts that fell together were ridiculously awesome.<\/p>\n

And there was a focused effort to make an longer hunt, targeted at large teams that could parallelize most puzzles as soon as they appeared. Some puzzles were\u00a0designed to be the largest puzzle of that type you’d ever done: a 2000-piece non-interlocking [jigsaw] puzzle, a 50×50 paint-by-number, a 26×26 cryptic, a music-identification puzzle with 263 clips. All of the methods used in the past decade to make hunts more elaborate – novel puzzle types and meta concepts, increased puzzle size, adding additional extraction steps – were tried, sometimes in a single puzzle.<\/p>\n

The organizers got a bit carried away with all of this. Unintentional pitfalls that make hunts run long showed up as well: some unpolished puzzles with confusing or unclued extractions, metas with many blind alleys, events that produced hard-to-decipher clues, single hard puzzles serving as a bottleneck to a round.<\/p>\n

Common refrains from puzzle reviews: “If it had been two or three steps shorter, I would have counted it among the best Hunt puzzles I’ve seen.<\/em>” \u00a0“We got stuck on the third aha, and further answers didn’t help us much<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

In all, the Hunt would have run into Tuesday without intervention, twice as long as its authors intended. By 2am Sunday, HQ started to send out hints. By Sunday night, serious hinting and free answers began. Somehow Sages managed to do all of this in a way that felt fair to all competing teams.<\/p>\n

Codex was at half-mast this year and not fully engaged, but we still had a good 80 active participants, including many talented first-timers. \u00a0And, most important, we all had a great time and much-needed break from the far less polished puzzles of life itself. \u00a0Thanks to all who joined in this Hunt, and especially to those who ran two additional events – the Intro to Hunting<\/a> session on Thursday night (designed by Mikalye and run by cScott “meteoric” Ananian, Andrew “the answer” Lin, and Molly Millions) \u00a0and our commemoration for Aaron on Friday.<\/p>\n

Some of the other Hunt reviews and recaps:<\/p>\n

Reviews by hunters<\/strong>:
\nI prefer puzzles<\/a>\u00a0(Eric Berlin, Palindrome<\/em>)
\nGashlyHunt Tinies<\/a> and\u00a0 Favorite Puzzles<\/a> (cScott, Codex<\/em> )
\nThank you, Sages!<\/a> (Emily Morgan, Codex<\/em>)
\nStorify timeline<\/a> &\u00a0 Hunt of Epic Proportions<\/a> (The MIT Tech)
\nClavis Cryptica<\/a>\u00a0| Part 2<\/a> (Clavicarius, first time hunter,\u00a0Left Out<\/em>)
\nThe First Aid Kit Is Not A Puzzle<\/a>\u00a0(Ben Smith, Left Out<\/em>)
\n<\/a>The year the Hunt ate Cleveland<\/a>\u00a0(Whom\u203d,\u00a0Metaphys Plant<\/em>)
\n<\/a>The year the Hunt won<\/a>\u00a0<\/a>(Mystery Fish,\u00a0Metaphys<\/em>)
\nChanging how we think about end of Hunt<\/a> (Leech, Metaphys<\/em>)
\nToo Big To Solve?<\/a>\u00a0&\u00a0 The Year the Mystery Hunt Broke<\/a> (Thomas Snyder, Luck<\/em>, blog | Wired<\/span>)
\nWrapup Part 1<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Part 2<\/a>\u00a0| The Nature of “Hard”<\/a>\u00a0 (Phil Sandifer)
\nA (Scathing?) Review of the 2013 Hunt<\/a> (zandperl, GUT of Love<\/em>)
\nzlfgrel uhag erpbzzraqngvbaf<\/a>\u00a0and fave puzzles (shaunagm, Codex<\/em>)<\/div>\n
\nReflections by the organizers<\/strong>\u00a0(Manic Sages):
\nThe Hunt we wanted and the Hunt we had<\/s><\/a> \u00a0(Karen Rustad, rdctd)
\nOn hosting the Hunt on MIT.edu<\/a>(Benoc)<\/div>\n
\n

Quick personal summaries of puzzles<\/strong>:
\nAndrew Greene<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Neville Fogarty<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Aaron Dinkin<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0C.Scott
\n<\/a>Sniffoy<\/a> | Curtis<\/a> |<\/span><\/p>\n

Suggestions for significant changes<\/strong>:
\nHaving a team beta-test the full Hunt a week earlier<\/a> (as is done with smaller Hunts)<\/p>\n

Other<\/strong>:
\nVideocasts by\u00a0C.Scott<\/a>, Death from Above
\nEric Berlin’s\u00a0Spaghetti warmups<\/a>.
\nGUT<\/a>\u00a0| Flat Luigi<\/a> | Call Me, Maybe<\/a> | D\u1ea5u T\u00edch Ho\u00e0ng T\u1ed9c<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>|\u00a0<\/span>Map of past coin locations<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Mystery Hunt 2013 pitted teams against\u00a0Enigma Valley\u00a0to\u00a0rescue the Hunt coins from a vault. As usual, it was full of some of the best puzzle ideas in the world. \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1202,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[78827,210,207,14968,6034,1,78819],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-aasw","category-chain-gang","category-indescribable","category-knowledge","category-meta","category-uncategorized","category-zyzzylvania"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iVvB-RG","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1202"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3328"}],"version-history":[{"count":32,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3333,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3328\/revisions\/3333"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}