I've been out of touch with a lot of people since the new year.
Here's what I've been up to:
I had a great time hunting with Codex Bodley in the
2008 MIT Mystery Hunt.
This year I felt that I made a larger contribution to the solving
process than either of the two previous years that I've hunted with
Codex. Here are the puzzles that I particularly remember working on:
Hearing
Voices (MacOS synthesized voices sound files with movie quotes) --
I knew that having been a computer lab monitor in high school would
come in handy some day! We solved this puzzle in a fairly
straightforward fashion, and I did a lot of the work on it.
Character
Witness (cartoon characters) -- this puzzle had a PDF containing
two pages with what was, it turned out, meant to be the same image on
each page. Unfortunately, the puzzle creators managed to make the
resolution of the bitmaps different, so I spent a long time adding,
subtracting, and otherwise comparing the two versions, to no purpose.
Ecolocation
(Latin, Name of the Rose) -- I enjoyed the use of Latin
in this puzzle and fairly quickly figured out all the Latin questions
and answers (some of which were pretty funny). Unfortunately, we only
got about halfway through because we were unable to figure out what
to do with the answers. (They were supposed to give us another Latin
text cryptically instructing us to find the name Ehrich Weiss on the
Harvard Bridge, insert "der", change the color to red, and translate
into English, which would have yielded "Eric the Red". On the
other hand, we did backsolve this puzzle.)
Talk to Me
(foreign language) -- despite having people who together knew a dozen
or two natural languages listen to this over and over again, we
never made any progress on it at all, and even ended up concluding
that it was probably not based on any natural language. It seems that
the Navajo code talker code remains quite effective to this day!
Tragedy
(cellular automata) -- this was a multi-layered puzzle and I noticed
a few of the layers (but there kept on being more and more layers
within layers)...
Instant
Replay (pinball) -- I helped identify a few of the pinball
machines (at one point even downloading and reading a PDF of a
Spanish-language pinball machine maintenance manual to verify a guess),
and we managed to solve this one.
The Dungeon
(video game) -- we all realized that there was something funny about
this video game (apart from the fearsome "vicious algebraic topologist"),
but nobody ever managed to figure out that it was actually Tic-Tac-Toe (!)
in the guise of a text adventure!
Son of
the Realm of Unspeakable Chaos (constructed language) -- this
was my favorite puzzle of the Mystery Hunt. (Like Ecolocation, it
was composed by Kevin Wald.) This puzzle involved deciphering a
constructed language called Chaotic, of which only tiny samples
existed from previous years' hunts. This time around there was an
entire dialogue purportedly representing the end of a mystery novel;
after an hour or two of deciphering, we realized that it was actually
based on the game of Clue! Deciphering the entire story took me and
two teammates about six hours, and was incredibly satisfying as more
and more details and jokes steadily emerged. To commemorate this experience,
I've had
red shirts
made bearing the Chaotic text of the punchline of the story (an
explanation -- in Chaotic -- of the notion of
redshirts
in the Star Trek universe, which turns out to be essential to understanding
a clue given by the murder victim in the form of a metaphor). Despite
fully deciphering the story, we were focused on the internal structure
and assumed that the answer to the puzzle had something to do with the
solution to the mystery (for example, that the answer to the puzzle
should be the name of the murderer in the story). It turned out that,
in typical Mystery Hunt fashion, the story was merely a set-up to teach
us the Chaotic language and mention, in passing, figures that could be
loosely interpreted (with the help of a detail in the story) as maritime
signal flags which spelled out words in Chaotic that could be translated into
an English phrase. Although we didn't solve the puzzle (and neither,
apparently, did any other team!), I'm very grateful to Kevin Wald for the
wild ride.
(The idea of a mystery story where the solution to the mystery does not directly yield the answer to the puzzle also turned up in The
Deadly Hobby of Murder, which I had worked on earlier; that one had three layers of meaning which had to be combined to obtain the answer, but it could be solved with only a knowledge of English, heraldry terms, and computer fonts... so, naturally, we got it in short order!)
(P.S. Confidential to Kevin Wald: the modern and ancient Greek terms for "galaxy" are γαλαξίες and γαλαξίας, respectively, not γαλαξία; the latter is the name of "a kind of milk-frumenty". Trido di py Liddell-paidagogos py Scott-paidagogos py Jones-paidagogos fi.)
