Hunt '09 Recap, Part 2: The First Half of Outer Zyzzlvaria
(Note: From here on out, I'm grouping things by round. This order differs wildly from actual chronological order of solving.)
Nurse Charnel's Reports from the Sickbay of the U.S.S. Parkerstone
Someone pointed out the Parker/Stone idea, I looked at the first entry, recognized it as a Kenny death, and passed the puzzle off to Tyler, who wiped the floor with it.
Well-Coordinated
I did some Google-monkey work for this one along with Tyler, Alison, and Ertch, and had the a-ha of how the whole thing worked at about the same time Tyler did.
Discworld
Vraal, Tin, Dart, and I sat down and wiped this one out in about a half an hour from first glance to final answer word. Oddly unsatisfying; I was hoping we'd have to assemble the crosses on the surface of a solid or something.
Supercollider
Ugh. Vraal and I walked the length of the corridor several times and were only able to spot two of these before we realized we were supposed to be looking at the video tour; Liz was much more successful at finding things, and several other people poured their efforts in, but I don't think we ever got this one. On the plus side, during our wanderings, Liz managed to randomly recruit a friend to our team.
Virtual Sectors Meta
Vraal spotted the super-supervocalic thing, I pointed out that the "breathe" instruction could apply to vowels, Tyler did some spreadsheeting, someone got S-P-RM-NS-DV-RS-R--L-MP, and I got BUY A VOWEL and called it in. I lost several geek points when I had to ask the room how much a vowel costs on Wheel of Fortune. At that point we'd assumed we were done; Evil Midnight had to call us and let us know we weren't. From there /dev (and others?) finished it up.
Our Favorite Martian
Another Vraal-and-I-sit-down-and-bust-through-an-audio-puzzle puzzle. Nearly went off track thinking it'd be one long phonetic string, which had Vraal searching for words ending in "-omancer" for a few minutes until I realized why the links were the words they were.
Please Prove Your Humanity
Others found the robots, I had the a-ha of building a word search out of the captchas, and Vraal and Dart actually did the word search.
Robots in Disguise
One of several "Aw, man, now we can't write that puzzle ourselves" moments Vraal and I had. We'd discussed a Secret Service code names puzzle for Seqquel months ago; I probably wouldn't have had the a-ha if I hadn't looked through the list back then trying to find one that fit our metas.
The Sexaholics of Truthteller Planet
Tyler did the hard stuff, I realized we had friendly five-digit binary numbers and pulled out the answer (after a brief stumbling period of trying to decode everyone instead of just the infected ones).
The Combatant's Guide to Zyzzlvaria
I got all of the letter changes and most of the wrong words in the final entry but didn't see how to extract an answer. Someone else polished this one off several hours later.
Harvoid Constellation Meta
At some point after we'd gotten through about a third to half of the Virtual Sectors and Combat Simulator puzzles, these puzzles started popping up as Julia and Bowen tracked them down out in the field. I made virtually no contributions to the puzzles in this round, but I did spot the acronyms of the puzzle titles and dump them into Google to get the ordering mechanism (thus apparently short-circuiting some clues Evil Midnight had planted elsewhere). When we had a few answers, I and others more or less simultaneously spotted the constellation abbreviations pattern, and I went off on a half-cocked idea that we'd need, for instance, an M-class star from each of Tucana and Aries, and that we'd need to connect the dots to get something from the game logo. ZB and someone else (I want to say Tin, but it could have been Dart) stared at this and finally shook the answer out of it after someone pointed out the erratum.
Keep It Stylin', Stupid
I say "virtually" no contributions because I did happen to have a black T-shirt and jeans on, allowing me to play a decidedly non-pumped-up Johnny Bravo here. I think I may have also provided the white sweatshirt that Tyler used to become Fred from Scooby-Doo. (Both of us had to turn our shirts around to hide logos; good thing they didn't ask us to turn around at any point.) Julia was the real hero of this one, though, running back to Liz's dorm and tracking down everything we needed (even borrowing from a few random neighbors of Liz's).
Crossed Wires
UGH. This was one of our final two unsolved puzzles in the Combat Simulator round. I was called to try and finish it off after Julia and others had worked out the colors, but they were convinced it they were resistors and didn't notice that the changes occurred at regular intervals, so their notes were just a string of numbers for each sound file. If I'd actually listened to the files, I probably would've gotten this one, as the twisted pairs code was fresh in my brain from Citizens of Virtue. When Evil Midnight announced that we could buy one puzzle answer, we'd decided there was no way we'd be able to solve the meta without at least one more answer, and /dev seemed to be making progress on Surgical Files, so we bought this one. A real shame, because this was a beautiful, beautiful puzzle in retrospect.
Combat Simulator Meta
I'm describing this one now, although it didn't actually fall until we'd solved every other meta but the last one. I had the pair-answers-with-dice a-ha about four or five answers in. Someone else (Dart?) had the they're-backwards-because-we-want-the-opposite-side a-ha. And then... we sat. For something close to, and possibly even exceeding, a full day. We tasked Kyle (our Supercollider recruit) with writing a program to assemble the polyominoes for us, but that fell through when it became clear that we weren't going to get a rectangle (or, as some of us thought, a shield shape to match this round's puzzle icons).
When it became clear that we were running out of new things to look at elsewhere, Wes gathered as many of our top meta-heads as he could find and took us across the hall to the food/sleep room to gang up on this one and kill it. Dart was the one who stared at this the most, so he went over what we knew step-by-step for all of us. Due to some miscommunications, Dart didn't hear about the errata on this and thought we were dealing with two separate sets of pieces that changed over time a la the Orbital Nexus; he wasn't helped when the old set of rewards actually mysteriously reappeared on the site for a while. Luckily, someone else in the room had gotten the errata, which prompted to Wes to call Evil Midnight for clarification. With that, things got a little simpler, although the new set had some unfortunate ambiguities the old one didn't when pulling letters out of answers.
I stared at the board where Dart had written up all of the pieces we had up to that point and pointed out we could make a "THE" and some other promising letter combinations by putting a certain two pieces together, and then spotted a third piece which could make even more nice words. We descended on the rest as a swarm and got enough of the end of the message for me to pull out HEMPEL as a backsolve. (I think I said something like "Oh, hey, is there a god strongly associated with ravens?" before we called it in. I don't think any of us realized Raven WAS a god.) That gave us the full message, and I dashed across the hall and practically screamed "JEWEL BOX" into the phone, got the shock of my life when it was wrong, and then immediately called them back after someone Googled which cluster it was. (Given that there was no meta-meta, you really should have accepted JEWEL BOX as an alternate answer, Evil Midnight. Boo. Booooo.)
Post-Hunt, I've heard several people say this meta was unfair because the assembled shape was non-rectangular. I don't think that was as much of an issue as people think; the big problem was that you needed a much higher percentage of puzzle answers than usual to have a chance of solving it, since any missing answer took out not only the corresponding piece but several letters on other pieces. I'm not sure how I would've fixed that if it'd been my meta, short of further constraining the answers such that each piece only had letters from the corresponding answer.
Orbital Nexus Meta
I did hardly any work at all on this round; probably the closest thing I had to an a-ha moment was realizing the orrery was a Chinese Remainder Theorem problem and calling /dev over to look at it. I think I was also the one who pointed out that we should look for eclipses beyond the first one, but others may have beaten me to it. When everything was sorted out, we were staring at ITS--EE- ROM--AN- ORL--DO- BEL--ED-, which was tantalizingly close to intelligible. I think one or two of us actually half-jokingly suggested ORLANDO'S BELOVEDS for the last part ("Of course! Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck!"), but it was clear we needed one more answer.
Apropos of nothing, at some point Gabby randomly decided to write all of the moon names (Warren, Harvest, etc.) on the board as a criss-cross, and proudly declared it "The World's Most Orrery Crossword". Gabby is excellent.
Employee Assortment Assessment
Vraal and I decided to try to work together on one of the three remaining Orbital Nexus puzzles. We were both too tired to even think about the air traffic control puzzle, and we had other people looking at Fantasy Magnoball League, so we took this one and walked across the hall to our other room... and after five minutes, returned in defeat. This seems like it'd be a really fun puzzle if there were explicit descriptions of what everything did, but in the form presented to us, it was basically a read-the-constructor's-mind puzzle. Fortunately a little while later Fantasy Magnoball League fell, and the Orbital Nexus fell immediately after.
Nurse Charnel's Reports from the Sickbay of the U.S.S. Parkerstone
Someone pointed out the Parker/Stone idea, I looked at the first entry, recognized it as a Kenny death, and passed the puzzle off to Tyler, who wiped the floor with it.
Well-Coordinated
I did some Google-monkey work for this one along with Tyler, Alison, and Ertch, and had the a-ha of how the whole thing worked at about the same time Tyler did.
Discworld
Vraal, Tin, Dart, and I sat down and wiped this one out in about a half an hour from first glance to final answer word. Oddly unsatisfying; I was hoping we'd have to assemble the crosses on the surface of a solid or something.
Supercollider
Ugh. Vraal and I walked the length of the corridor several times and were only able to spot two of these before we realized we were supposed to be looking at the video tour; Liz was much more successful at finding things, and several other people poured their efforts in, but I don't think we ever got this one. On the plus side, during our wanderings, Liz managed to randomly recruit a friend to our team.
Virtual Sectors Meta
Vraal spotted the super-supervocalic thing, I pointed out that the "breathe" instruction could apply to vowels, Tyler did some spreadsheeting, someone got S-P-RM-NS-DV-RS-R--L-MP, and I got BUY A VOWEL and called it in. I lost several geek points when I had to ask the room how much a vowel costs on Wheel of Fortune. At that point we'd assumed we were done; Evil Midnight had to call us and let us know we weren't. From there /dev (and others?) finished it up.
Our Favorite Martian
Another Vraal-and-I-sit-down-and-bust-through-an-audio-puzzle puzzle. Nearly went off track thinking it'd be one long phonetic string, which had Vraal searching for words ending in "-omancer" for a few minutes until I realized why the links were the words they were.
Please Prove Your Humanity
Others found the robots, I had the a-ha of building a word search out of the captchas, and Vraal and Dart actually did the word search.
Robots in Disguise
One of several "Aw, man, now we can't write that puzzle ourselves" moments Vraal and I had. We'd discussed a Secret Service code names puzzle for Seqquel months ago; I probably wouldn't have had the a-ha if I hadn't looked through the list back then trying to find one that fit our metas.
The Sexaholics of Truthteller Planet
Tyler did the hard stuff, I realized we had friendly five-digit binary numbers and pulled out the answer (after a brief stumbling period of trying to decode everyone instead of just the infected ones).
The Combatant's Guide to Zyzzlvaria
I got all of the letter changes and most of the wrong words in the final entry but didn't see how to extract an answer. Someone else polished this one off several hours later.
Harvoid Constellation Meta
At some point after we'd gotten through about a third to half of the Virtual Sectors and Combat Simulator puzzles, these puzzles started popping up as Julia and Bowen tracked them down out in the field. I made virtually no contributions to the puzzles in this round, but I did spot the acronyms of the puzzle titles and dump them into Google to get the ordering mechanism (thus apparently short-circuiting some clues Evil Midnight had planted elsewhere). When we had a few answers, I and others more or less simultaneously spotted the constellation abbreviations pattern, and I went off on a half-cocked idea that we'd need, for instance, an M-class star from each of Tucana and Aries, and that we'd need to connect the dots to get something from the game logo. ZB and someone else (I want to say Tin, but it could have been Dart) stared at this and finally shook the answer out of it after someone pointed out the erratum.
Keep It Stylin', Stupid
I say "virtually" no contributions because I did happen to have a black T-shirt and jeans on, allowing me to play a decidedly non-pumped-up Johnny Bravo here. I think I may have also provided the white sweatshirt that Tyler used to become Fred from Scooby-Doo. (Both of us had to turn our shirts around to hide logos; good thing they didn't ask us to turn around at any point.) Julia was the real hero of this one, though, running back to Liz's dorm and tracking down everything we needed (even borrowing from a few random neighbors of Liz's).
Crossed Wires
UGH. This was one of our final two unsolved puzzles in the Combat Simulator round. I was called to try and finish it off after Julia and others had worked out the colors, but they were convinced it they were resistors and didn't notice that the changes occurred at regular intervals, so their notes were just a string of numbers for each sound file. If I'd actually listened to the files, I probably would've gotten this one, as the twisted pairs code was fresh in my brain from Citizens of Virtue. When Evil Midnight announced that we could buy one puzzle answer, we'd decided there was no way we'd be able to solve the meta without at least one more answer, and /dev seemed to be making progress on Surgical Files, so we bought this one. A real shame, because this was a beautiful, beautiful puzzle in retrospect.
Combat Simulator Meta
I'm describing this one now, although it didn't actually fall until we'd solved every other meta but the last one. I had the pair-answers-with-dice a-ha about four or five answers in. Someone else (Dart?) had the they're-backwards-because-we-want-the-opposite-side a-ha. And then... we sat. For something close to, and possibly even exceeding, a full day. We tasked Kyle (our Supercollider recruit) with writing a program to assemble the polyominoes for us, but that fell through when it became clear that we weren't going to get a rectangle (or, as some of us thought, a shield shape to match this round's puzzle icons).
When it became clear that we were running out of new things to look at elsewhere, Wes gathered as many of our top meta-heads as he could find and took us across the hall to the food/sleep room to gang up on this one and kill it. Dart was the one who stared at this the most, so he went over what we knew step-by-step for all of us. Due to some miscommunications, Dart didn't hear about the errata on this and thought we were dealing with two separate sets of pieces that changed over time a la the Orbital Nexus; he wasn't helped when the old set of rewards actually mysteriously reappeared on the site for a while. Luckily, someone else in the room had gotten the errata, which prompted to Wes to call Evil Midnight for clarification. With that, things got a little simpler, although the new set had some unfortunate ambiguities the old one didn't when pulling letters out of answers.
I stared at the board where Dart had written up all of the pieces we had up to that point and pointed out we could make a "THE" and some other promising letter combinations by putting a certain two pieces together, and then spotted a third piece which could make even more nice words. We descended on the rest as a swarm and got enough of the end of the message for me to pull out HEMPEL as a backsolve. (I think I said something like "Oh, hey, is there a god strongly associated with ravens?" before we called it in. I don't think any of us realized Raven WAS a god.) That gave us the full message, and I dashed across the hall and practically screamed "JEWEL BOX" into the phone, got the shock of my life when it was wrong, and then immediately called them back after someone Googled which cluster it was. (Given that there was no meta-meta, you really should have accepted JEWEL BOX as an alternate answer, Evil Midnight. Boo. Booooo.)
Post-Hunt, I've heard several people say this meta was unfair because the assembled shape was non-rectangular. I don't think that was as much of an issue as people think; the big problem was that you needed a much higher percentage of puzzle answers than usual to have a chance of solving it, since any missing answer took out not only the corresponding piece but several letters on other pieces. I'm not sure how I would've fixed that if it'd been my meta, short of further constraining the answers such that each piece only had letters from the corresponding answer.
Orbital Nexus Meta
I did hardly any work at all on this round; probably the closest thing I had to an a-ha moment was realizing the orrery was a Chinese Remainder Theorem problem and calling /dev over to look at it. I think I was also the one who pointed out that we should look for eclipses beyond the first one, but others may have beaten me to it. When everything was sorted out, we were staring at ITS--EE- ROM--AN- ORL--DO- BEL--ED-, which was tantalizingly close to intelligible. I think one or two of us actually half-jokingly suggested ORLANDO'S BELOVEDS for the last part ("Of course! Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck!"), but it was clear we needed one more answer.
Apropos of nothing, at some point Gabby randomly decided to write all of the moon names (Warren, Harvest, etc.) on the board as a criss-cross, and proudly declared it "The World's Most Orrery Crossword". Gabby is excellent.
Employee Assortment Assessment
Vraal and I decided to try to work together on one of the three remaining Orbital Nexus puzzles. We were both too tired to even think about the air traffic control puzzle, and we had other people looking at Fantasy Magnoball League, so we took this one and walked across the hall to our other room... and after five minutes, returned in defeat. This seems like it'd be a really fun puzzle if there were explicit descriptions of what everything did, but in the form presented to us, it was basically a read-the-constructor's-mind puzzle. Fortunately a little while later Fantasy Magnoball League fell, and the Orbital Nexus fell immediately after.