The “hydra” we are dealing with is a meta-puzzle. To extract another answer, you must find a way to use the solutions of other puzzles you have already solved. If you can solve this, you can get more puzzles.
We know that we need to diagram the answers to this round of puzzles as binary trees. In keeping with the mythological similarities of the Hydra metapuzzles, each puzzle you solve will branch out into two more, completing a 5-level deep diagram. I still haven’t found the answers to some open puzzles that will help me understand how diagrams work and how to derive answers to meta-puzzles. Your green chalk diagram becomes more chaotic as you add to it, delete it, and annotate it on a crowded blackboard. But we can only sense one “Aha!” It takes you away from solutions.
MIT’s Mystery Hunt began in 1978 when Dr. Brad Schaefer received his Ph.D. in 1983, and during his Independent Action Period (IAP) in 1981, he created 12 “subcrews” on a single sheet of paper as an assignment for a friend. It continues to challenge puzzle enthusiasts every year since I wrote it. The answer led the solver. to the Indian head penny he had hidden on campus. While today’s hunts are still built on that basic concept, what constitutes a challenge has changed over four decades. One of the clues from the original 1981 Hunt is the missing word in the quote. Your Majesty will honor me. Nowadays, it’s easy to solve with Google, but back in 1981, even if you knew it was Shakespeare, you could spend hours searching for a character who mentioned a play within a play if you didn’t notice a subtle hint that you should be looking for a character that mentioned a play within a play. It may have taken. I spent hours skimming through the bard’s collected works to find the answer.
Jade Chonsasaponpong ’24/MIT Technique
Over the next few hours, we will add some more solutions to the Hydra diagram. Eventually someone noticed that the L and R seemed oddly spread out across all the answers in the fifth level of the diagram. This is the “Ah!” moment: Tells you how to navigate the binary tree. Starting from the first node at the top of the tree, traverse L and R in the order in which they appear in each of the 16 solutions at the fifth level. Take the left branch, then right, then left again until you reach a word that starts with H. The second 5 level answers lead to words starting with E. Repeat this process for all 16 answers and you’ll know the next appropriate method. Dealing with Hydra: “Head-Head Battle”. (Puzzle answers are traditionally written in all caps, with no spaces or punctuation.) Those working on the puzzle should take a moment to enjoy their victory before splitting up and finding a new puzzle. I’ll take it.
Some elements of Mystery Hunt are hard to describe, a must-see ingenuity that also inspired the hacking of the Great Dome and the many transcendental engineering projects displayed on campus each year. While most puzzles are completely unique, they often incorporate mainstream elements such as crosswords, Sudoku, and Wordle, as well as logic and word problems. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, you can combine a chess puzzle with the card game Magic: The Gathering. Or, the solver might organize a Git repository containing 10,000 out-of-order commits (i.e., find the correct sequence of 10,000 changes to a file tracked in a version control system) or identify a duet from a musical. You may be asked to do something or draw a picture. About pop culture trivia knowledge.
For most of its history, Mystery Hunt had little official status on campus. Tradition as well as organizational effort meant that each team only showed up in Lobby 7 for kickoff on the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. In 2014, the MIT Puzzle Club was established to provide continuity and other support throughout the year, such as securing rooms for teams to work in and reserving Kresge Auditorium for the opening ceremony. The Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini-puzzle hunts and Sudoku and logic puzzle contests. “It really helps us reach out to new students and people who are interested in puzzles,” said Becca Chan ’26, the club’s current president. ). ”
Thanks to technology, Mystery Hunt has been able to grow and evolve significantly, as well as the types of puzzles possible. Until the mid-1990s, one person could take on the responsibility of writing and running an event. The winning team is currently undertaking a year-long effort to design next year’s hunt. To do so, they need to manage the creative output and technological infrastructure that rivals small and medium-sized businesses. Duties include spending thousands of hours creating and testing puzzles, building physical puzzles and props, and building dynamic websites that can withstand a large influx of puzzle-hungry visitors.
Jade Chonsasaponpong ’24/MIT Technique
Assembling a team of solvers can be a huge undertaking, especially now that more participants are participating remotely. Anjali Tripathi ’09, who started the team “I’m Not a Planet Evil” in 2015, got her introduction to puzzle hunting through the Miniature Mystery Hunt run by Simmons Hall for first-year students. After working on Main Event with the Simmons team on campus as an undergrad, she first participated remotely in 2010. “I was overseas in England and I still wanted to do the hunt. I remember how difficult it was,” she says. The team “didn’t have the infrastructure for that.”