(Untitled)

[rford]

This was a strange mystery hunt for me. My team (Metaphysical Plant, which wrote the S.P.I.E.S. hunt) got our asses kicked, solving close to all the regular puzzles but only one second-half meta. Yet unlike a lot of recent years which defeated us, we were steadily productive and having fun throughout. The puzzles I worked on were my largely

Comments

[gemini6ice]

There was something about requiring a number of escape pods (each a certain number of dollarbucks) somehow proportional to the number of members on a team. I think this was a good effort in balancing teams despite team size. Unfortunately, a larger team simply has more man-hours to allocate, and this will always be an advantage

[snowspinner]

Apples to Apples worked like this:

Three of the cards you could play "crashed" the applet. One of those made it obvious that the errors weren't real, because it was explicitly a printer error. If you looked up the errors you'd find that they were all errors for Apple's LaserWriter printer. The error codes for those errors (which were obscured with pictures of apples in the error messages, suggesting their importance) corresponded to the PLU codes for the types of apples the cards were named for (Braeburn, etc.)

If you beat the game (getting 10 successful matches), it would crash and give another error message. That message has the PLU code for the Ginger Gold apple, giving you the answer GINGER GOLD.

[gemini6ice]

corresponded to the PLU codes

AHA! This was the step we didn't get. We realized that all the nouns were apples, but I never knew that each variety of apple had a specific PLU to it. I thought those were grower-specific or something. Thank you!

[dumble]

What I appreciated about the second half metas was that even though they required multiple "aha"s, when you had each "aha", you knew it was right. Things like the distribution of vowels in Virtual Sectors or they way the answers lined up with the dice in Combat Sector clearly weren't coincidences. So although you did have to go through lots of steps to get to a final answer, at least once you had taken each step, you could be certain it was right, and just keep working from there, rather than second guessing your previous work.

[rford]

But those were the ahas we got; there was no reason to think the pentaminos would form a rectangle-minus-the-corners, for instance, and such a thing very clearly could be a coincidence. If it had been a rectangle (or better, a square), or if the shape had been included in the graphics atop each puzzle, it would have been better. Obviously until there are written solutions it's hard for me to know the ratio of these types of ahas. The two metas we basically solved (lazyr and the moons meta, which we knew exactly how it worked and just didn't have quite enough answers) seemed fair, but the others sounded more complicated at wrap-up. I just know we had an awful lot of answers without a lot of metas.

[yuethomas]

When we (the Sages) were solving the Combat Simulator meta, we thought that the 8*8 grid which made up Inner Zyzzlvaria was the board game element that had to be used. If you take the gray and the yellow (Core Reactor?) cells (and not the planets), there are exactly 52. We struggled with that for a few hours, found no arrangement that required no rotation of the pieces, but was /actually able/ to fit the pieces once we allowed rotation. Needless to say, that led us off track for quite a long time.

I'm not sure how we ever got the 7*8 minus corners arrangement at the end.

[gwillen]

FYI we did use the 8x8 grid -- it was for the Reverse Dimension meta. We figured that ou in the wee hours Monday morning, so you may have been asleep.

[jedusor]

the hunt as a whole rewarded large teams to a degree that makes me uncomfortable

My team won, and I'd like to point out that we're about 25 people including remote solvers.

[rford]

Of course; I don't mean to suggest that being very large was required. But compared to two years ago, it seemed to be a much greater advantage this year. Of the teams that beat us that I know a lot about, all but your team seemed to be of the extra large variety. And though when we won my team was 120 people, this year we were more like 45 at our peak (and 5 at our trough), significantly smaller than, say, Manic Sages or Random or Tetazoo or Codex.

[yuethomas]

It's funny. At the wee hours of Saturday morning when we had essentially no metas (and pretty much all of the puzzles) done in Inner Zyzzlvaria, we thought that the hunt was actively punishing big teams. But then we finished the board game and the puzzles came pouring in faster than we knew what to do with.

[yuethomas]

(Sage, by the way)