February 21, 2005
Puzzle Hunt 8
This weekend was Puzzle Hunt 8 at Microsoft-- a weekend of puzzle-solving debauchery shared by 57 teams of 12 people each. The event started at 10 AM Saturday and ended at 5:30 PM Sunday.
A couple of years ago my team ran Puzzle Hunt 6 which was, by most accounts, the best hunt ever. This one was better.
My hopes were high going into the hunt, since Games Magazine contributors Mike Selinker and Mark Gottlieb were both on the organizing team. I'd played in a 3-hour hunt they created for a National Puzzlers League convention a few years ago, and it was top-notch. This hunt ran flawlessly. We required no hints for any puzzles. None. And I don't mean just hints released to the general population-- we didn't get any kind of assistance from the organizers at any time during the hunt. No verification of partial answers, no reinforcement that we were on the right track, nothing. It wasn't necessary. The puzzles were sensible, well-designed and executed, and required no superhuman leaps of intuition to solve.
The first round was particularly elegant, consisting entirely of a Las Vegas travel brochure that, at first glance, didn't appear to contain any puzzles at all. In fact it contained seven, plus the most brilliant meta-puzzle I've ever seen. Each puzzle resolved to an instruction. Following all seven instructions resulted in cutting out parts of the brochure, folding them into rectangular tubes, cutting holes in them, and shining a light on them to cause them to cast a shadow in the shape of a 5-digit phone extension. A thing of beauty.
My team won hunts 2 and 5, ran hunts 3 and 6, and lost hunts 4 and 7. Given that pattern, we "expected" to win this hunt. We got the first solve a few minutes into the hunt, securing a lead we never lost. We were on fire, solving almost half the puzzles before any other team and ultimately finishing the hunt at 5 AM, 19 hours in. The next team finished three hours later. On one level it was a bit disappointing to finish so early (we WAY overbought on the food front, expecting another twelve hours of puzzling), but they say it's always better to leave 'em wanting more. The hunt never wore out its welcome, and we finished exhilirated and satisfied.
I pity the team that has to follow this act. Because it's us.
Posted by Peter at February 21, 2005 2:07 AMThat's one thing I sort of don't like about the MIT Mystery Hunt: only one team gets to finish because it ends immediately after. Did the other teams keep going because they didn't know you had won, or they did know but that didn't stop them?
Posted by: Doug Orleans on February 21, 2005 6:59 AMCongrats, Peter & CGT.
Posted by: Scott on February 21, 2005 10:18 AMThe other teams are not informed when a team wins. Standings are visible throughout the hunt, as well as a list of each puzzle, the number of teams who have solved that puzzle, and the name of the team who solved it first. The actual scores are not shown during the hunt. So you can see where you are ranked relative to the other teams, but not how close you are to catching them.
So while the other teams were not told that we'd won, I don't think any would have been surprised. Ultimately, seven of the 57 teams finished the entire hunt.
Posted by: Peter on February 21, 2005 10:56 AMA hunt where the only contact you had with the organisers was to supply the very final answer? By one sensible measure, that makes it perfect.
Congratulations! Can you link us to the site at all? Can outsiders see the puzzles, or is it Intranet-only? It does seem to be a shame that there are so many fantastic puzzles written for the hunts (including your PH6!) which aren't shared with the puzzling public at large. I am convinced there is the market for more similar WWW-based games, possibly on a paying basis, but strictly against a time limit - probably even on a couple-of-hours one like the Google US Puzzle Championship.
Posted by: Chris M. Dickson on February 21, 2005 12:19 PM"Did the other teams keep going because they didn't know you had won, or they did know but that didn't stop them?"
Well, my team (for instance) was headquartered the floor above CGT, so we knew they had won when they decamped and headed home at 5am Sunday. For that matter, we knew they weren't going to be beaten, at least not by us, when they provoked the release of the second round of puzzles by lunchtime on the first day. (Everyone got the puzzles at 10am, and CGT's first solve was at 11:05. Unreal.)
While we were playing to win, our realistic goal was to complete the metapuzzle and finish—which we did, more or less. The MIT system of ending with the first finisher sounds needlessly disappointing. I know there are dozens of teams in the Hunt who just have fun for two days solving puzzles at their own pace, without any real chance of winning or even finishing. I can't see any good reason to end the event early and send people like that home.
Posted by: Stephen Beeman on February 21, 2005 10:16 PMThe MIT hunt doesn't quite finish the moment the winning team gets the coin. Often the organizers will still accept answers for an hour or three more. This year, three teams got to do the final runaround (including mine but I was asleep WAHH!!) and I think got to finish it even when the lead team had gotten the coin. Varies a bunch depending on the organizers and time of day/night the coin is found I think.
Posted by: Aaron on February 22, 2005 8:46 AMGlad you guys had fun!
Posted by: Matt Jones on February 24, 2005 1:24 PMMy team also knew (or at least guessed) when CGT finished - our HQ had a view of the building puzz central is in, and we saw them walk out of it, not in a hurry and looking happy.
Posted by: Steve Dupree on July 20, 2005 12:47 PM