I suspect you're right about the reason behind the sudden enforcement of MIT overnight policies. It reminds me a bit of my junior year of high school—every semester the school did this retreat to spend a weekend at an old barn in a small town in New Hampshire owned by the founder of the school, and then my junior year the town fire marshal got around to inspecting the barn and was like, no way are you letting 130 teenagers sleep in that anymore, it's a miracle the place didn't burn down decades ago.
There was a round in the 2003 Hunt whose puzzles all had non-word answers—most of them were pictures, though one was, like, a physical slice of chocolate orange. In retrospect it's a little surprising that that wasn't attempted again between then and 2020; it certainly creates a broader range of possible puzzles and metapuzzles to be explored. Perhaps in the era of telephone answer confirmation it was just too much of a hassle? (2003 also had a puzzle whose answer was "m", if I remember correctly—i.e., specifically lowercase m.)
Plant was able to make some headway into the Creative Pictures meta with about three quarters of the puzzle answers, but not enough to come close to solving it. We'd figured out seven or eight of the ten movies and figured out the placement of two of them in the grid (Up is the entry point, which makes The Wizard of Oz easy to place as well)—but without the rest of the emoji I think we were very far from figuring out where to place the others. And there's a little inconsistency and underspecification in how much of the movie the emoji cover; we knew Cinderella was in there, but since the fairy godmother doesn't appear until about halfway through the movie it certainly didn't occur to us that she might be the first emoji in the movie, for instance.
I think the unlocking of the later rounds was a bit slower than would be ideal. A principle Plant held to in designing the 2006 and 2011 Hunts was that even slow teams should have all rounds of the Hunt unlocked by late Saturday night, so that everyone at least gets to see what all of the rounds look like; slow teams are there to have fun, and if there are fun puzzles in the later rounds they should get the chance to see them. I guess I see the argument against that—if slow teams unlock all rounds by Saturday night, then fast teams will either unlock them much sooner than that and find the coin really early, or have to be artificially slowed down waiting for more puzzles to unlock—but I hope there's a balance than can be struck there.
I don't think Plant has been paying much attention to "optimal" team size; we've just got, you know, whoever feels like solving on our team in any given year. But since we're not aiming to win, we're not putting all our effort into solving most efficiently, and so teams who do do that are going to do better!
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There was a round in the 2003 Hunt whose puzzles all had non-word answers—most of them were pictures, though one was, like, a physical slice of chocolate orange. In retrospect it's a little surprising that that wasn't attempted again between then and 2020; it certainly creates a broader range of possible puzzles and metapuzzles to be explored. Perhaps in the era of telephone answer confirmation it was just too much of a hassle? (2003 also had a puzzle whose answer was "m", if I remember correctly—i.e., specifically lowercase m.)
Plant was able to make some headway into the Creative Pictures meta with about three quarters of the puzzle answers, but not enough to come close to solving it. We'd figured out seven or eight of the ten movies and figured out the placement of two of them in the grid (Up is the entry point, which makes The Wizard of Oz easy to place as well)—but without the rest of the emoji I think we were very far from figuring out where to place the others. And there's a little inconsistency and underspecification in how much of the movie the emoji cover; we knew Cinderella was in there, but since the fairy godmother doesn't appear until about halfway through the movie it certainly didn't occur to us that she might be the first emoji in the movie, for instance.
I think the unlocking of the later rounds was a bit slower than would be ideal. A principle Plant held to in designing the 2006 and 2011 Hunts was that even slow teams should have all rounds of the Hunt unlocked by late Saturday night, so that everyone at least gets to see what all of the rounds look like; slow teams are there to have fun, and if there are fun puzzles in the later rounds they should get the chance to see them. I guess I see the argument against that—if slow teams unlock all rounds by Saturday night, then fast teams will either unlock them much sooner than that and find the coin really early, or have to be artificially slowed down waiting for more puzzles to unlock—but I hope there's a balance than can be struck there.
I don't think Plant has been paying much attention to "optimal" team size; we've just got, you know, whoever feels like solving on our team in any given year. But since we're not aiming to win, we're not putting all our effort into solving most efficiently, and so teams who do do that are going to do better!