Hunt Write-Up

[okosut]

Finally getting around to writing something about the Mystery Hunt:

This was a tough year writing the hunt for me. I ended up putting a LOT of time into it, which I hadn’t expected at all at the outset. In the comments on my hunt wrap-up post last year, I wrote:

I'm going to be much [busier] this year (graduating + probable post-doc + applying

Comments

[codeman38]

On "The Word", the independence of the answer extractions was precisely what caused Codex to only get one of the three answers. We got one of the 'aha's (the last one on the solution page), and so we thought that the other two answers would have extractions either along the same lines or dependent on the first. Of course, it turned out that the other two extractions were completely different in nature, and unrelated to the first except by the general theme of the puzzle. We even picked up on the state and number clues, but didn't think to connect that to the actual show being spoofed because we were still thinking about wordplay internal to the video.

(Of course, we also weren't helped by the red herring of having a LOTR reference in the video when there was a Fellowship triforce and the clue we had extracted was "Shirer book"...)

[luckylefty]

Thanks for all the work you put into this hunt! It was a lot of fun

[tahnan]

Your comments about Recombination and the Zelda structure very much echo my own thoughts, so needless to say I'm glad to see them here. That said, every hunt has puzzles that turn out harder than intended, and problems that teams run into that couldn't have been predicted by testsolving, so ultimately, no worries. (Lord knows there are things I regret putting into the Matrix hunt, both puzzle-wise and structure-wise

[aarondf]

We also had issues with "The Crypt" for similar reasons. We very quickly noticed the AB issue and I think this creates a big problem for the puzzle. I at least am not going to totally ignore this information, as is needed to solve parts one and two. It just seems an unreasonable thing to ask of people. And in terms of solving part three, it is totally reasonable to expect teams to treat it as a Bacon cipher (although we didn't - people working on it didn't know the type well enough) but without the hint from part two, hard to expect people will go far enough to do the three stages of part three. The third stage would be obvious from the second but the second is not obvious from the first which I would think would lead people to think they were on the wrong track without the hint.

I generally think the puzzles having multiple answers thing, while a very cool idea, is hard to do right. The straightforward ones like Light World are fine but not so cool. Trickier ones like this though can lead to pretty big issues.

[tahnan]

I didn't think the A/B thing was an issue, per se. We did in fact solve part three without ever having the hint you get out of part two. And if we had gotten stuck, well, it's not like there wasn't something else obvious we could have been doing with the puzzle (i.e., solving the actual cryptogram).

[devjoe]

Well, you guys will win again someday, and you can use the leftover puzzles from Pac-Man (and other worlds?) when you do, if you can figure out how to fit them into whatever theme you use that year, and if technology and timeliness haven't obsoleted the puzzles.

[davidglasser]

Can puzzles really be reused, if people who saw them may now be on other teams?

[dr_whom]

I'm planning to post the Pac-Man meta in an "outtakes" section, once I can figure out an elegant-looking way to do so.

[okosut]

I think the Pac-man metas were sufficiently coupled to the structure of that world that they probably couldn't be reused, even if not for the reason you mention, and that dr_whom wants to post them. Also, I really don't want to win again :)

[selospur]

I am doing research for my university thesis, thanks for your great points, now I am acting on a sudden impulse.