The post wherein I comment on Mystery Hunt puzzles

[dr_whom]

So, as noted, I didn't actually spend that much of this year's Mystery Hunt solving puzzles. That's not going to stop me, though, from writing up some thoughts on a few individual puzzles.

• The Wicked Switch and Middle-See. Although I said I felt like I was kind of off my game this year and didn't contribute a lot to puzzle solving, I guess I did actually get a pretty good start. The Wicked Switch was the first puzzle I and a bunch of people worked on ('coz we were all like 'ooh! a crossword! I know how to do a crossword!' I guess) and I'm pretty sure I'm the one who made the realization that both the grid words that didn't match their clues and the long answer-extraction entries each constituted a pangram. Having the first three Across entries all be non-matching words was pretty devious; for quite a long time our working hypothesis was "the Across clues and Down clues fill separate grids", and it took us quite a while to notice that only six words weren't matching between our two grids. When we solved the puzzle I thought that WORD AFTER SALT AND BEFORE TEACHER was a pretty poor clue for SUBSTITUTE, but I only just now noticed how appropriate SUBSTITUTE is as an answer for that puzzle, which mitigates the clunkiness of the clue somewhat. Anyway, after we solved The Wicked Switch I did basically my only drive-by solve of the Hunt—I walked over to the people who were working on Middle-See and was like 'what's this puzzle about', and they were like 'well, we solved the clues but don't know what to do next', and I stared at it with them for a few minutes, and then I was like, 'oh, stick one word into the middle of the other word'. I didn't get the final answer extraction, but coming over to a puzzle someone else is working on and getting the aha is always a good feeling.


• Fight Choreography. Whee, a cryptic-clues puzzle! Actually I think I might have had the key aha on this one also—so I had a good track record on puzzles in the first round, I guess? Maybe I felt off my game for most of the Hunt mainly only because of fatigue. Anyway, I joined this puzzle after the relationship between the images and the clue answers had been identified, but I think I'm the one who proposed comparing the extra words from the images to Batman sound effects. It sounded like a dumb idea to me when I proposed it—seriously, "URKK"? and who even knew that there was a findable canonical list of Batman sound effects?—but sometimes in the Mystery Hunt dumb ideas pan out like that, and it made for an amusingly goofy puzzle.


• Criss Cross and The Answers are Somehow Connected. Man, I love puzzles whose gimmick is that every clue has two answers. They're just so elegant. And a great illustration of a good general Hunt puzzle solving principle, which was also demonstrated in the testsolving process for last year's puzzle Pattern Recognition: if you're trying to solve some clues or find some patterns, and they seem so ambiguous that you can't decide which is the correct interpretation of a lot of them, and this keeps happening, you should consider that maybe that's because the ambiguity is necessary for the puzzle.


• Google Bodyslam. I just wanted to thank Codex for giving this puzzle an answer that was so easy to backsolve.


• Towers. I joined this puzzle after it had been mostly solved, but not enough letters of the final cluephrase had been extracted to read it off. I went to work on one of the word pairs (EARTH/HEART) to try and figure out how many moves it would take to convert one to the other, got 26, and I was like, 'well, that's probably wrong; hard to see what a Z would be doing in that cluephrase. Maybe I'm not very good at Tower of Hanoi.' Then I moved on to look for a different puzzle to work on. Oops, I guess? But anyway, this is an extremely cool puzzle with a really nifty wordplay gimmick.


• The 25th Annual Putnam County Debate Tournament. The red herring we got stuck on on this puzzle was looking for the specific types of fallacies and invalid arguments the paragraphs were using. The reason we were convinced that was right was because one of the names was "Chewbecca", and the Chewbacca defense was in fact the rhetorical trick used in at least one of the paragraphs. I doubt this was a deliberate red herring, but it was a pretty strong one. Anyway, here is as good a place as any to note that I appreciated and enjoyed the choice of musical-based titles for a lot of the puzzles in this Hunt; I'm always fond of working the Hunt theme in wherever it will fit.


• Behave. The nearest thing I had this Hunt to a solo solve. I wasn't working on it alone by any means, but I think I solved most of the clues and spotted all four of the patterns, and then Julian plugged the result into an online Playfair solver to extract the answer. As I mentioned elsewhere, I didn't really contribute to solving any metas this year; even most of the pure metas in this Hunt were not quite my style somehow. But spotting things like "these words are made of adjacent bigrams"—that's reminiscent of the kind of meta solving I guess I'm actually pretty good at. So, yeah. I liked this puzzle.


• Twosquare. The magic-square/Latin-square gimmick here we all found hilariously cute. We solved the Latin square pretty quick but never figured out how to do the magic square. The night before the Hunt leech and I taught a sort of mini-seminar for Mystery Hunt newbies on the topic of "this is what solving a Mystery Hunt puzzle is like" (it was noahspuzzlelj's idea but he couldn't make it), and two of the solving techniques we covered, using for both the example of Wry, Ergo Dead from SPIES, was "is there a canonical way to associate letters or numbers with data of this type?" and "could it possibly be a reference to some specific book that I might not have read?" But I guess we didn't listen to our own advice as far as this puzzle was concerned.


• Evil Influence and Award-Winning Poetry. So I woke up Saturday morning to find we'd just unlocked the Mayan Fair Lady round, and it was full of puzzles I wanted to work on! How could I choose? So I picked the two most obviously appealing ones—the cryptic crossword and the one that was obviously about showtune parodies—and I started working on them simultaneously, joining the group that was looking at Award-Winning Poetry on their laptops while at the same time filling in the crossword grid on paper. I'm actually kind of disappointed with my performance on Award-Winning Poetry—I feel like I should have been able to recognize more of the songs than I did—but maybe it's because my attention was divided.


• Itinerant People of America. Apparently my biggest missed opportunity this Hunt. So we've unlocked the Mayan Fair Lady round, right, and I'm looking at all the puzzles to see which I should work on, and I glance at this one and I go, ugh, looks like it's an IPA cryptogram. ...See, you might think that, being a phonologist, I'd really like phonological puzzles. But the thing is, being a dialectologist, I know that it's next to impossible to write something like a phonetic cryptogram in such a way that it's correct for all solvers. The Least You Could Do Is Phone Me from last year was actually a lot harder to write than it looks for that reason; I constrained myself to use only words that I knew were minimal pairs in all mainstream dialects of American English. (I had to give up on British English, just because schwa minimal pairs were so hard to find; I ended up having to use an /ə/~/ɚ/ minimal pair, which of course would be homophones in a non-rhotic dialect.) I vetoed a proposal for a phonetic crossword in SPIES for this reason, and when the phonetic crossword in 2007 turned out to be full of obvious phonetic errors I felt all my worst fears were confirmed. So I've got this huge built-up bias against things like phonetic cryptograms and consequently I passed over this as soon as I saw it—even though I did think when I was looking at it, 'oh, looks like the encoding is feature-based; that's pretty nifty.' And it turns out that not only was it a really elegant puzzle—both according to the people on my team who solved it and my opinion when dumble showed me the solution after the Hunt—but in fact it was one of the two individual puzzles that dumble had been specifically hoping I would work on. So, I'm kind of sorry I skipped this one. If it hadn't been in the same round as both Evil Influence and Award-Winning Poetry I probably would have ended up working on it anyway.


• The Rainbow Connection. The other puzzle that dumble was specifically thinking I'd enjoy, and another one that I skipped over without a second thought during the Hunt. This actually is a case of an interesting conundrum for Hunt puzzle writing: it's not always possible to make sure a puzzle gets to the people who'll be interested in it. For instance, "a puzzle about the Muppets" is something that obviously I would want to work on, but "a puzzle whose data is a bunch of colored rectangles" is exactly the type of Mystery Hunt puzzle I'm least likely to want to start in on. Obviously the title could have been a help here, but titles are only occasionally relevant in that respect. (And then the flip side of this is at the same time, I was working on Evil Influence, a puzzle which starts off being exactly the kind of puzzle I want to start in on—a cryptic crossword—but then turns into Some Nikoli Puzzle I've Never Heard Of for its second step.) Anyhow, at dumble's suggestion, I did solve this one after the Hunt, and somewhat gratifyingly basically all of my first guesses about how it worked turned out to be right. I like this puzzle, even though it isn't a type I usually would have wanted to start, and though I'm not that crazy about the final answer extraction; it has just enough data in it to be able to figure out what's going on.


• Cross-Breeding. Seth and I did most of the research and grid-filling on this puzzle, and then Lanthe had the aha on what to do with the hybrid names. I'm mainly commenting on it because it seems to have experienced the same mistake that Rivalries last year did, and gone into the Hunt with an underspecified grid: PAPILLON and HAVANESE are the same length and intersected only at the second letter, which means there was no way to determine which goes in which space, and therefore two possible ways to enter the hybrid name HAVALLON, one of which extracted an O while the other extracted an L. We tried the O first and extracted the answer COINTON, which wasn't a word we knew, but when we Googled it we found Cointon Kennel, a dog breeder, and figured it had to be right, right? When it turned out to be wrong, we found CLINTON, and then convinced ourselves that it wasn't really ambiguous, because if you wrote them so as to extract the L from HAVALLON, then all the hybrid names read from left to right, which was a pattern we'd missed in extracting COINTON; but we weren't really all that satisfied with it. I was reassured, post-Hunt, to find that the ambiguity in the grid was meant to have been fixed.


• Set Theory. I quite enjoyed this one! Actually something very similar to this puzzle was my original proposal last year for a Zelda meta-meta (note that the puzzle is Triforce-shaped), but we didn't use it because we thought it was too constrained to write. So I'm glad Codex was able to make this puzzle idea work! I'm also glad leech was able to extract the answer UNION on the basis of just one of the three interior clues (LABOR) plus the puzzle title.


• Sovereignty. So I went into this Mystery Hunt with one specific goal, to wit: if there's a Dominion puzzle, I want to participate in solving it. And I did! I joined it after noahspuzzlelj, mystery_fish, and saizai had been working on it for a little while and made some progress, but I definitely also contributed to identifying the cards and solving this one. Noah had the final breakthrough, identifying card C as City instead of Market; and then Sai plugged that into the formula for answer extraction and said, 'well, that's better, but we're not quite done yet', since the formula was still producing the gibberish-seeming string ATZERODTORVOLOKHEG, but on a hunch I Googled ATZERODT and from that Noah got the answer. I like this puzzle a lot, but I question one aspect of the format: it seems like each line should begin with the cards the player has in hand at the beginning of the turn, but it doesn't; the presence of Torturer in the puzzle makes that impossible. It's actually showing the cards the player drew at the end of the preceding turn. But why is this being displayed at the beginning of the turn, rather than the end of the preceding turn? That seems like a basic Dominion structural error, and it made me and Noah unconvinced that Torturer could be in the puzzle for much longer than we should have been.


• JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS. This puzzle got mixed reviews on our team—most notably, Noah loved it and Seth hated it, which surprised me since last year editing with them I got the impression that they usually have similar opinions on major questions of puzzle structure. I come down on the pro side on this one, myself; I love when puzzles play with people's expectations for what the structure of a Hunt puzzle will be.


• Now I Know My ABCs. This was probably my favorite puzzle in the Hunt. Just an absolutely brilliant way of combining a wordplay puzzle and a music puzzle using canonical mapping. I contributed very little to solving it (other than misidentifying "Home on the Range" as "The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze"), but it was so awesome to be in the room listeining leech looking up the letter-note mappings, putting together the tunes, and identifying the songs. Major kudos to Codex on this one.


• Piercing the Veil. I didn't work on this puzzle, or even attempt to read it. But I totally burst out laughing just when Kate and Andrew showed it to me when I was walking by. Well played, brokenwndw, well played. A worthy followup to Meta testing!.

Other puzzles that I worked on and liked, but have no specific comments on: Jekyll and Hyde, Match Game, Initial Public Offering, Bad Poetry, Letter Head

Once more: congratulations and thanks to Codex, and most especially to brokenwndw and dumble, for an excellent and extraordinarily clean Hunt, and for giving me an unexpected opportunity to spend a weekend writing showtune parodies. (In a future post: our lyrics!)

Comments

[devjoe.livejournal.com]

Oh, that's where that clue went. I came up with the final answer on Wicked Switch when the clue phrase was called out across the room, while I was working on some other puzzle.

[novalis.livejournal.com]

I made that same complaint about Sovereignty when I fact-checked it, actually.

[brokenwndw.livejournal.com]

By total coincidence Mayan Fair Lady contains about half of my favorite puzzles this year, and is also one of our cleanest metapuzzles IMO. If I had to show someone just one (half-)round from this hunt that would easily be the pick.

[kaihuang.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the reviews on Now I Know My ABCs, Criss-Cross, and The Answers Are Somehow Connected. I'm happy that someone whose puzzle interests are so far away from mine (not polar opposites, but pretty damn far) was able to enjoy a few of my constructions. It makes all those hours working through the constructions worth it.

[davidglasser.livejournal.com]

Re your principle for Criss Cross and Somehow Connected: We really should have applied that principle to Imposters, in which we managed to identify 4 roles for almost all of the actors but never quite managed to identify all 5 for even one actor.

[scotthandelman.livejournal.com]

And thank heavens, too, because fact checkers for Impostors were very willing to check the correctness of the roles listed, but were very unwilling to check that the fifth role didn't actually apply to the actor of the other four by coincidence. When it was in testsolving, every time they would try to fill in the fifth role for the US actor, I'd freak out and run off to IMDB just to make sure that I didn't screw up.

[scotthandelman.livejournal.com]

(And by "very unwilling" I don't mean that they were obstinate...our fact checkers were great! But who the heck would want to check every actor's entire career filmography for a role that may or may not exist? That's just painful!)

[saizai.livejournal.com]

FWIW on Sovreignty: Randall w/ a clue from 4pq1injbok cracked the setup — at least for me; noahspuzzlelj & mystery_fish may've started in some remarkably close timing coincidence.

And yeah… I recognized Volokh (I love the law blog), but I didn't even realize Atzerodt was a word. ><

That was a very nicely crunchy puzzle.


IPA was actually done right; 4pq1injbokcan testify on that account. The extraction was rather amusing, also.

[dougo.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize Sovereignty was a Dominion puzzle until after the hunt, but then I spent a nice leisurely week on it. It took me way too long to think of googling ATZERODT and instead I kept being baffled by AT ZERO DT. Evil!