dr_whom | Hunting from home

It's been a week since the 2021 Mystery Hunt, and I've finally got time to put down my thoughts about the Hunt! Due to the Current Condition of the World, this Hunt was held entirely online, and as a result this was my (and presumably a lot of people's) first time doing the Hunt from home rather than in a room full of my teammates in Cambridge. The structure of the Hunt was built around an MMO-type online environment where solvers would explore an alternate-universe version of MIT called the "Perpendicular Institute of the World" (⟂IW—i.e., MIT upside-down); I was surprised to learn at wrapup that this had been the plan all along, before COVID forced the Hunt to be all-virtual, since it seemed like such a perfect substitute for the role the physical MIT campus usually plays in the Hunt.

Anyway, I barely interacted with the ⟂IW virtual environment at all—in part because I was absorbed in solving the puzzles themselves; in part because, well, during a normal Mystery Hunt I don't usually interact with the physical MIT campus all that much; and in part because bandwidth issues or something that meant I couldn't really have the ⟂IW "Projection Device" and video chats with my co-solving teammates open at the same time without severe lags. I think the Hunt's novel puzzle-unlocking mechanism sounded really clever—you unlock new puzzles by interacting with NPCs in the ⟂IW virtual world, and solving puzzles can earn you access to new areas of the map so you can find new NPCs—although I never really interacted with it myself. The writing team said their plan was to simultaneously make the Projection Device essential to the Hunt while also making sure people who weren't interested in it and just wanted to focus on solving puzzles had the opportunity to do that, and I guess from my vantage point in that second group it seems to me that the plan worked well enough!

Being at home rather than together in one place with the team meant that it was harder to get a feel for what other people on the team were working on, and thus the overall structure of the hunt and its rounds. In Cambridge, when people are working on a metapuzzle they usually do it on the big whiteboard in the front of the room, which makes it easy to see where we stand with respect to progress on a meta, when people are working in it and when they have insights, and so on. I think the absence of that physical presence this year it part of the reason why I had little involvement in metapuzzle solving, and it may be why it took my team a long time to get started on some of the metas—it was hard to see where were were on them and prioritize. Or at least that was how I experienced it.

I like the trend in Mystery Hunt design where the Hunt begins with a single round with a straightforward meta structure, and then once that is completed it opens up additional rounds which might each have their own widely varying structures. So some of the later rounds in this Hunt had multiple submetas in parallel, some had just one meta for all the puzzles, some had submetas sort of nested within each other: having each round not only have a different metapuzzle but a potentially different structure of how the metapuzzles relate to the puzzles keeps solvers on their toes and adds another layer of interest. I didn't work on the giga/kilo/milli/nano round meta structure at all, but I want to especially highlight the innovative structural conceit of that one: a round which is solved by backsolving an impossible puzzle based on the meta answer, rather than on extracting the meta answer itself; and backsolving that reveals that it's the meta answer to another round which works the same way, so instead of solving puzzles to get to a metapuzzle to get to a meta-meta, you start from the meta-meta and work down to the bottom-level puzzles. I have no idea what the experience of solving that was like, so I don't know if it was actually fun to do (and it seems to depend more on pre-existing familiarity with typical Hunt round structure, in order to subvert it, than most metas do); but I'm very impressed by the idea and by the level of experimentation with what defines a Mystery Hunt round and metapuzzle.

I'm also grateful to the writers this year for not giving us a fake theme: the theme presented at kickoff was what the theme of the Hunt actually was. There were plot developments over the course of the Hunt that kept the theme interesting, but not radical twists revealing that the theme was something other than what we'd been told it was. I think a fake theme has been done effectively approximately once, and that was in 2003. I was wondering, given the "upside-down" gimmick of the name ⟂IW, if it would turn out to be a Stranger Things theme, but I'm just as happy it didn't.

Finally, the puzzles! Almost all of the puzzles that I worked on myself I thought were great. I mean I have some criticisms here and there, but overall these seemed like an extremely solid set of puzzles—even though it seemed like there were a whole lot of errata emails making corrections to them! I think the remote-solving experience pushed me to do more beginning-to-end solves on puzzles; often in Cambridge I sort of flit between puzzles when I hear people on the other side of the room doing something that sounds interesting, or when we hit a dry patch on a puzzle and stop making forward progress. Not being in a room with the rest of the team made me more likely to focus on a single puzzle instead of getting distracted by bits and pieces of others. There were a few puzzles I dropped in on in the middle, and a few I abandoned because I wasn't making progress, but I think I did way more complete puzzles than I often have in recent Hunt years.

Some comments I have on specific puzzles!

✏️✉️➡️3️⃣5️⃣1️⃣➖6️⃣6️⃣6️⃣➖6️⃣6️⃣5️⃣5️⃣: The first puzzle I worked on in the Hunt, I think. It had a cute "do you dare?" gimmick, almost reminiscent of the "call our mothers" puzzle from 2000: "I think it's telling me to text this number. Do I actually want to text this number? What if I'm wrong and I'm bothering a random person?" Of course the puzzle title made it pretty obvious, but it still felt like a bit of an exciting risk, which is a nice Mystery Hunt feeling, especially when it turns out to be right. The puzzle itself was pretty cute, and had a nice sort of "training" structure—it would give you a relatively easy clue to teach you how the emoji cluing was supposed to be interpreted, and then there would be a more complicated one of the same general type now that you understand the basic structure. The timing of a three-minute lag between submitting a guess and receiving the next clue meant I could look at other puzzles while I was waiting to get a response, which was nice, although I assume it was an attempt to prevent solvers from spamming the number with too many wrong guesses. The end of the puzzle was a bit of an anticlimax, though; I expected we'd get some complex clue that would use several of the emoji-clue mechanics we'd been trained in to extract the answer, but instead we just got a set of emoji that spelled out the answer directly. (The fact that the answer was the word EMOJI I thought was hilarious, but some people on my team seemed to be annoyed by it.) Also, in working on this puzzle and trying to keep my teammates updated on the clues I received on our collaboration spreadsheet, I discovered that it's possible to copy a text message on my iPhone and seamlessly ⌘V paste it on my Mac; this was handy but kind of creepy and I don't know if this is a feature I explicitly turned on somewhere or what. (I feel like there were a bunch of emoji-themed puzzles in this Hunt, which may have been the result of the writing team's extremely annoying name, "✈️✈️✈️ Galactic Trendsetters ✈️✈️✈️".)

Just Index. Okay so first of all this is a really clever twist on the standard Mystery Hunt mechanism of "indexing" into strings; but I specifically want to compliment this puzzle for doing a great job of signposting the solver to indicate that they're on the right track. The first three indices are the only conventional ones in the puzzle, and they spell out ANS, the first three letters of ANSWER, which encourages the solver to conclude correctly that indexing is indeed what's going on here, not a red herring. So then you have to figure out how to interpret large real numbers, real numbers less than 1, and complex numbers as indices; fortunately the next three clues feature one of each of these, and you have a pretty good idea that if you apply the indices correctly it'll spell out WER. So you figure out how to interpret those indices, you get WER as predicted, and then you know that you can use the same method on the remaining clues to extract the actual answer. It's just a brilliant job of using the puzzle itself to teach the solver how to solve it.

Circles. I like to see puzzles about Mystery Hunt history in the Hunt, though I feel like this Hunt was pushing it a bit by having at least two of them (this and Unraveling the Mystery) and maybe a third that I don't remember; having a lot that depends on being able to identify things from past Mystery Hunts is kind of unfriendly to new Hunt participants. That said, this puzzle did a good job of having an easy extraction that was solvable with only a subset of letters; you don't have to have identified all of the past Hunts in order to be able to call in the answer to the puzzle.

Cryptic Transmission: At wrapup the writing team explained that the puzzles in the "Students" category were supposed to be easier than those in other groups, and I said to myself that I hadn't noticed that during the Hunt; but that might just be because I didn't really notice which puzzles I solved were in the Students group. I did notice that this puzzle seemed pretty easy for a cryptic-clue puzzle, though. And it was a good one! It played with the concept of cryptic clues in an interesting way, and embedded the cluing of the answer extraction into the puzzle itself, in a way that I thought was very clever. And the grid was extremely elegant—no reason a puzzle with this concept had to be a word square, but if you can create a word square that fits your puzzle, why not do it?

The Lexicographer Looks After His Own: A Mystery Hunt puzzle genre that I quite like is the one that's basically "hey, here's an interesting thing that I, the puzzle writer, know about; I bet you, the solver, would be interested in finding out about this too!" That's basically the spirit with which I wrote a very pedestrian puzzle about the Ig Nobel Prizes for the 2006 Hunt—I wanted solvers who didn't already know about the Ig Nobels to have a fun time reading about them. And so I'm glad that puzzle genre is still going strong, with this puzzle whose main goal seems to be getting solvers to read Ambrose Bierce's Devil's Dictionary. My main contribution to solving this puzzle seems to be that I was the first person on my team to look at it to both spot the clue BIERCE DICTIONARY and have heard of the book, and then we had a fine old time looking up definitions in it.

Successively More Abundant in Verbiage: Okay so this puzzle seems to be about "Increasingly Verbose memes", which is a meme genre that I've never heard of and that it doesn't seem like anyone else who worked on the puzzle with me had heard of, but it didn't stop us from solving the puzzle, so that's a good sign. The fact that we didn't know the meme, I guess, only meant that we didn't know whether the shorter or longer clue went with the worse drawing, and so we tried it both ways until one of them gave us an answer. In any event, this puzzle was fun to solve.

The Infinite Corridor round structure and metapuzzle: Conceptually, I love this. First of all, the theme of the round is brilliant—the Infinite Corridor is actually infinitely long and has infinitely many puzzles in it, and yet you still have to somehow solve enough of them to do the metapuzzle. (I'm a little disappointed that the round only had 100,000 puzzles in it, but I guess there's a limit to what can actually be implemented.) Thematically this is hilarious, and structurally it's a great way to build a round around the general Hunt principle that you shouldn't need to have all the puzzle answers to solve the meta—that principle is enforced by the structure of the round, and then part of the metapuzzle becomes the puzzle of figuring out which puzzle answers you actually need. And then one of the puzzle types in this round is "Infinite Corridor Simulator", which makes the round infinite in another way—the notional infinite recursion of having a round whose meta is isomorphic to one of the puzzles within the round (and so the solution to the meta is in fact the same as the solution to one of those puzzles, the one Infinite Corridor simulator that simulates the Infinite Corridor that you're in). And then, there's another exploitation of infinity built in to the answer extraction process for Infinite Corridor Simulator, which implies a bijection between the Simulator puzzle answers and the letters in Simulator puzzle answers, which, given that there's more than one letter in the puzzle answers, is only possible if there are infinitely many puzzles. So overall, I'm super impressed by the theme, concept, and structure of this round. Still, the upshot of this round structure is that you basically do need to solve essentially the same puzzle multiple times in order to get the answers you need, which could easily get tiresome. This is seems like it's especially the case for Cafe Five, where you have to solve a barrage of mini-puzzles for 45 minutes. That was a fun activity to do with my team once, but I wouldn't have wanted to have to do it three or four more times (at about 45 minutes each!) to get the answers we needed to solve the meta.

Circular Reasoning: This was just great, and it seems like it must have been very hard to construct: writing clues that can be literal clues for one thing and cryptic clues for something else is not easy! I was very impressed by how cleanly this all came together. Possibly my favorite puzzle in this Hunt.

Questionable Answers: I didn't see this puzzle until after the coin had been found, and I have no idea whether or not anyone on my team actually did the Jeopardy! game interaction that this puzzle entailed or if the clues were just all released to us when we unlocked the puzzle or what. My partner K. and I did this one together after dinner Sunday night, and I thought it was great for an after-supper winding-down puzzle: cute concept, fun to solve, not too difficult, straightforward answer extraction. I love Jeopardy!, and I love the way this puzzle mocks the basic Jeopardy! conceit of answers and questions.

Water Bottle: I want to commend the puzzle writers for making the effort to incorporate physical-item puzzles into a Hunt that took place entirely remotely, going so far as to mail out puzzle components to solvers. This one involved a bunch of bottles of flavored water; the solution writeup says that we can "use the shape of the bottle, or the list of 15 flavors..., to determine that the brand is Hint Water"... but the way we identified them was by noting that the Hint Water logo is visible on the inside of the bottle cap! So seeing that logo was what led us in the right direction; I don't think any of us who were working on the puzzle had heard of the brand before, or at least we certainly weren't familiar enough with it to recognize it from the bottle shape! (I hope that the way the puzzle was conceived was that the puzzle writer saw Hint Water in the grocery store or wherever and thought, hmm, what if it actually was a hint?) This was the first puzzle I asked K. for help with, since K.'s sense of smell/taste is much more sensitive than mine; between K.'s diagnoses and one of my teammates running to CVS to buy a bunch of Hint water to compare with the ones he'd received, we were pretty much able to identify the flavors. Anyway, the next step to this puzzle is asking for a hint on the puzzle, and using the brand name "Hint" as a hint for the action of hinting is pretty cute, and the fact that the hint interface becomes an integral part of the puzzle rather than an optional way of seeking assistance plays with the fourth wall in an interesting way.

When All Is Lost: This is a fun cryptic with a good answer extraction, but I think it lays on the theming a little thick in a way that doesn't 100% work. The prominent pictures of the various characters—Katara, Elsa, etc.—makes it seem like their identities or the works they originate from are going to be relevant to solving the puzzle in some way; but all that's used from them is the wordplay based on the given quotes. And then the fact that the title of the puzzle is "When All is Lost" suggests that subtracting the letters ALL is going to be more important to the puzzle than the other five wordplay manipulations, but it's not; it's odd that the puzzle title specifically highlights one of the wordplay gimmicks that's no more significant than the others. That said, the puzzle itself is really good; it's just the robustness of the theme accoutrements that doesn't quite work for me.

Altered Beasts: K. and I did this puzzle together after dinner Saturday night, and it was just loads of fun searching for Transformers and matching them to the artwork and trying to interpret and solve the clues. Honestly we opened up this puzzle and took one look at the manipulated clues and I was like, nope, that looks terrible, and then K. was like, come on, I think we can solve these clues, look, there's the word IROQUOIS! And I was proven wrong, and I was very impressed by how adept K. was at descrambling and interpreting the clues. Eventually K. went to bed and I recruited a bunch of other teammates to help me solve the last handful of clues and push through to the answer extraction. Looking at the solutions, I don't think we ever quite figured out what transformation #7 was, but I guess we got close enough to come up with almost the right string for the final answer, and then we fudged it and called in the cIosest word that it looked like and we were right. think I spent about five hours on this puzzle all told. It's a very satisfying experience to be able to solve a puzzle that I first looked at and thought was too hard, and depends on a topic I don't know much about (Transformers), but eventually falls together in the end. A really well-constructed puzzle.

🤔: K. and I tried this one before Altered Beasts, didn't make much progress on it, and gave up to find another puzzle to work on. Looking at the answer now I see that K. basically figured out exactly how the puzzle worked, except for the fact that all the clue answers are interjections, sound effects, and onomatopoeias, which definitely makes me go 🤔. A lot of these don't even have canonical spellings. Were we really supposed to figure out that an ambulance clues the specific string WEEOOOWEEOOO?

Squaring the Circle: The last puzzle K. and I worked on before the coin was found. I really like this one as well. The crossword is challenging but fair, and once you get a couple of words paired up in the grid the rest start getting locked in pretty well; this helps identify the more obscure words like MAGGOTORIUMS and PARTICULARISES (this puzzle must have been very constrained to create)! It was very kind of the puzzle to make it clear exactly how each 12-letter answer is placed in the grid (where it starts and what direction it goes), rather than making you figure it out for yourself as some puzzles might; this one didn't need that extra step! I do think it's a little fishy that, for the answer extraction, you're told that you have to CUT LONG AXIS TO START, and you do that, but then you have to cut the long axis a second time to actually finish the construction and there's no direct cluing of that. The solution writeup says that "perhaps searching for things one can do with two paper rings, solvers may come across a mathematical curiosity"; that's a little vague to count on, given that you have to come up with that mathematical curiosity in order to solve the puzzle, and the first two steps of the construction are directly stated! But fortunately someone on my team knew about that mathematical curiosity and thought of it while we were trying to think of what to do with our two paper rings, so I guess I can't complain too much. Once you do cut it down the long axis a second time, the crossword grid has now been divided into four strips and it's not that easy to figure out what letters are actually in the proper places for answer extraction (I spent much too long doing the trigonometry to figure out what those places were, by the way), since you've probably cut through some of the letters as part of carrying out this construction; that's a little unfortunate also, but at least it's not too hard to go back to an uncut copy of the grid and count off the right positions. Anyway, this puzzle was a lot of fun to solve even if the third step of the construction was underclued; and cutting out the grid and turning it into a square was a great aha moment.

Some other puzzles that I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any comments about, include the following: Common Knowledge, Don't Let Me Down, For Better or For Worse, Not Again!, The Yew Labs metapuzzle, Exactly, and Look What We Drew. And while I was looking through puzzles to write this blog post, I came across Title of the Puzzle, a delightful little puzzle that I never actually saw during the Hunt but that I highly recommend.