Py nea galaksia lokula-pazosto-sulda at
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.)
