Puzzles in the sea

[dr_whom]

Here's the post where I comment on some puzzles from this year's Mystery Hunt that I found worthy of comment!

• The Machine Room meta. I didn't contribute to solving this meta in any way; I just really appreciate its construction. I've felt for a long time that puzzle titles are an under-exploited data stream for meta information and I'm glad to see them get used for this one.


• Montages. This was a cute puzzle and fun to work on, but I think Random Fish accidentally let us get away with not actually solving it? We solved about a half dozen of the 20 clues, identified the extra song, and called in the title of that, and instead of just being told 'no, that's incorrect,' we were told we might want to try the "contact HQ" link instead of the "call in answer" link, at which point it was clear what we had to do and we never solved the rest of the clues or indexed anything into anything or extracted the intended phrase.


• The Misspelled Insects. Good use of props! You can extract the clue phrase from the t-shirt alone without even knowing which puzzle it's associated with, but you still have to solve the puzzle itself to be able to extract the answer, which is smart design.


• People and Places. Okay, we didn't solve this puzzle because we solved the meta without needing it. Then we tried to backsolve it but were stumped on what could possibly rhyme with "4 Lorax". We called in a couple of halfhearted guesses like MORE BORAX, and we even tossed around the correct answer but never called it in because it seemed so implausible. We finally found it in the word search in endgame.


• The Chemistry Lab meta. A really delightful meta, notwithstanding the questionable answer mentioned above. Because of the order in which we solved the puzzles, for some time we assumed that all of the clued titles would be ones that contained a pair of rhyming words themselves, but that turned out not to be the case—there probably aren't enough titles, I guess?


• Eh? A hilarious little one-clue puzzle. You could visualize a normal Mystery Hunt puzzle consisting of like 12 or 16 clues of this type, but having just the one was a delightful way to set the tone for the easy-puzzle School of Fish round.


• The Coral Reef meta. Oh man, one of my favorite types of puzzle is the "each clue has two answers" puzzle. This isn't one of those, but it has the same sort of tightness of construction that I like so much about them. I also appreciate that it has enough hints and enough checkpoints to be just solvable without having all of the puzzle-answer inputs—an essential quality for metapuzzles that it's very easy for an instruction-following puzzle to fail to exhibit. (And I'm also very impressed with my teammates for being able to pull it off with incomplete input—it was possible, but not easy!)


• A Short Transmission. I guess I solved this puzzle? That is, redcat9 called me over and said 'we think this is a Morse Code puzzle based on stressed and unstressed syllables; what's the answer?' and I took the puzzle and went over to the Morse Code chart and read it off, but I don't really understand why I was needed for that. Cute extraction though, I liked it.


• Watch Me Blow This! A chess puzzle! I don't think I've ever actually done a chess puzzle before. Well, I guess there's a benefit even for experienced solvers in having a round of easy puzzles—it's a nifty chance to do some puzzles outside our area of expertise. We got the wrong move on the fifth board and I only just now figured out why it was wrong, but we were still able to solve the puzzle.


• Game. The whole Treasure Chest round was great—an elegant way to fit physical puzzles into the structure and theme of the Hunt, delivered in style. (And very exciting for those of us on the team who were on the overnight solving shift when it showed up!) The Game puzzle was a not-too-hard but fun puzzle that had one of the best features of some physical puzzles—that moment when you have to ask yourself "should I destroy or disassemble this puzzle artifact that I may not be able to replace if that's the wrong thing to do?" Washing off the ink-covered die to prove we were on the right track was a very satisfying moment—though I'm glad we had the aha that the red die was magnetic before chmrr followed through on Plan A, which was to just smash the red die open. (Also, I got so much ink on my hands doing that that my phone couldn't sense my fingers for the next hour or so.)


• The Treasure Chest meta. This meta took my team much longer to solve than it should have; it was one of the metas we didn't solve until they opened oracle hinting on metas. I think it's because on some level we're still stuck on the dichotomy between "pure" metas, where the puzzle is just based on the properties of the words that form its input, and "shell" metas, where there's some kind of external structure to fit the words into. This meta had an obvious shell, the treasure map, and we figured out it was a grid, and then we spent so much time trying to fit the puzzle-answer words we had into that grid that it didn't occur to us for ages to try to solve the set of words as a pure meta as well. A well-constructed meta, and an indication of a way we might need to get better at thinking about meta solving.


• The Curse of the Atlantean's Tomb. A fine example of a standard Mystery Hunt puzzle type (i.e., crossword with a gimmick). Seth was convinced while we were solving it that the nautilus shells in the artwork and their position and orientation would be relevant for answer extraction; I assumed they were just there for decoration and turned out to be right. This poses a question I don't have a good answer for—how much non–puzzle-relevant artwork can a puzzle have without being misleading or confusing? (This is closely related to the perennial flavortext debate.) A lot of people had the same confusion about the artwork for some of the Atlantis metas, where the puzzles were symbolized by shells pointing in different directions that turned out not to mean anything. For some reason I find the "you shouldn't include that if it doesn't mean anything" position more sympathetic for metas than for regular puzzles—maybe just because the stakes are higher for metas.


• The Spotted Tower meta. We backsolved this one after solving the Atlantis meta-meta. I think it might have too many steps, but I like it a lot. I had the aha that the puzzle answers worked like the Mega Man meta-meta from 2011 and then went to bed, and shortly after that cluing was opened up for metas; and I think we might have been led off track by misinterpreting an oracle clue for this one. That said, we did eventually reach the second aha and found FLU and so on, so we probably would have figured out the next step eventually if we hadn't solved the meta-meta first. Anyway, I guess it kind of serves us right, after Bio Man in 2011, that the meta about diseases was one that we couldn't solve.


• Floating Crossword. A delightful and novel crossword variant. We only had to fill in two thirds or so of the grid, if that, to be able to extract the answer, which is kind of too bad; it would have been nice if it had made us solve more somehow.


• Quodlibet. This was a lot of fun to work on! However, I must take exception to the use of "Love Me Tender" in this puzzle—"Love Me Tender" has the same tune as "Aura Lee", so if you're cluing melodies, there's no reason for the solver to pick one title over the other. (Actually, since the other seven songs in the puzzle belong more to the "traditional" than "pop" repertoire, "Aura Lee" seems like a better choice.) Since the letter being extracted from the title was E, you'd think at least it could have been extracted via the sixth letter, which is E in both titles. But anyway, we were able to guess the answer with only three or four of the letters extracted, and I am nitpicking; this was a cute puzzle.


• Mashup. I worked on this and got partway before abandoning it; I don't know who if anyone on my team eventually solved it. But I just now looked at the solution for it, and it is great.


• The Atlantis meta-meta. This was such an awesome meta-meta idea. I like it when rounds have a theme that the meta (or meta-meta) ties into, but this was the first time I can recall seeing a round with a secret theme, and part of the meta-meta involves noticing that there's a theme and figuring out what it is. I mean, I guess in principle you could figure that out here by just treating the meta answers as a pure meta; you could extract the overall theme from those alone if you were sufficiently clever. But in fact the theme pervades not only the meta answers but the methods of solving the metas as well, and the implied Atlantis plot; my team got the aha from the artwork. That's first-class meta-meta construction.
  

Some puzzles that I worked on and enjoyed, but don't have any specific comments on: Captain Ager's Puzzling Adventure, the Optics Lab meta, The Accumulator, Memory Lane, A Toast, Funny Shapes, Dr. Nautilus's Secret Notes, and the Golden Tower meta. …And as I look through the puzzle index to make this list, I find several puzzles that I never worked on or even saw during the Hunt that I think are extremely clever, including Time is Out of Joint, p1ctures, and Dory.

Anyway, thanks to Random for an excellent Hunt. (Of course, it was probably inescapable that a team affiliated with Random would produce a high-quality Hunt.) Great job!

Comments

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

Which answers were you missing for the Coral Reef Meta? We backsolved Polyglot and the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid using the early clues but had all the rest.

[dr_whom]

We were missing Ariel's Scavenger Hunt at least, and backsolved the 10,000 Puzzle Pyramid quite late into solving the meta. I'm not sure if we were missing any others.

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Cute though Quodlibet certainly was, I had the exact same objection only more so -- we immediately noticed that there was no "standard" title for "What Do You Do With a Drunken Sailor," and commented that we sure hoped the puzzle didn't depend on indexing into titles... even more than Aura Lee/Love Me Tender, I've never even *heard* that song called the title that turns out to be "correct"!

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

Codex's spreadsheet had that song listed as:

"Drunken Sailor (sometimes called Weigh Hey and Up She Rises) (or Erly in the Mornin)"

Edited to add: Also, "Aura Lee (Love Me Tender?)"

[dr4b]

Oh, that's too bad on Montages. The "OMG GUYS WE HAVE TO BUILD A SNOWMAN" moment when staring at most of the answer string was probably one of my favorite moments of the hunt -- also that it is one of the more accessible puzzles to tell non-puzzlers about when they ask "So what exactly did you do all weekend at MIT?"

People and Places was extremely frustrating in the extraction -- I worked on it for a while, figured out the banknotes thing, and when it was the remaining open one in Chemistry I similarly knew it was going to rhyme with "Four Lorax", have ten characters, and so on... I submitted a few things like "Sore thorax" and whatnot. We did eventually forward solve it but I had moved on by then. My best guess at the time was some kinda weird indexing thing since I figured I'd get the X out of Mexico. Alas.

You know, having heard about people "backsolving" some answers out of the word find, I almost feel better that we got solutions for all the puzzles *without* doing the word find, though!

BTW, I still can't figure out if I met you during some point when I was hanging out with various subsets of your team but didn't particularly catch a lot of names. Sorry about that.

[dr_whom]

The correct answer to People and Places was literally something we had come up with and discussed as a potential answer that was too improbable to even be worth calling in, so at least when someone spotted it in the wordsearch I knew what it was he had found, anyway.

I don't think we met! I didn't get to Cambridge till late Thursday night and so I missed pre-Hunt hanging out. Unless you showed up when we were hanging out in the Marriott lobby post-Hunt and I don't remember you?

[dr4b]

Oh - no, I didn't come over to the Marriott but instead got Chris to come over to the Kendall. It had a cozier lobby for puzzlers to hang out in. :)

[qnmark.livejournal.com]

We forward-solved People and Places, almost. We indexed wrong and got ABORTHORAX instead of BOARTHORAX. Cue several hours of trying to look for answers to the clue "ab or thorax," like stomach. Took that long for someone to figure out the indexing mistake.

[codeman38.livejournal.com]

On the topic of red herrings in puzzle artwork: Codex wondered, during our 10-hour span where we completely failed to get the aha for the Atlantis meta-meta, not only whether the directions of the shells were important, but also whether the purple gems on three of the four towers might have been of any significance. Particularly given that the three towers with directional shells were also the same three towers that had the gems. (Naturally, neither of these was significant!)

(And the seahorses did turn out to be important, but not for the reason that we had initially thought. Two pairs of horses facing in opposite directions, a grid with 64 squares... thank goodness the Oracle was answering metas by that point, before we got too far down the "knight's tour" garden path.)

[anasai.livejournal.com]

Of course the year we're on the same team and I actually spend a decent chunk of time on Hunt is the year where we have 0 overlapping puzzles worked on (Time is Out of Joint is the only thing you mentioned that I did anything on).

[dr_whom]

Next year, perhaps!