IAP Mystery Hunt
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The IAP Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition held each January at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hundreds of people in dozens of teams work for over 48 hours straight to find an unusual coin hidden on campus and the right to run the Hunt the next year. Participants come from around the country and play remotely from around the world.
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Structure
The team running the Hunt can make any changes they desire, and the structure changes to some degree from year to year. However, the general form has been constant since at least the mid-nineties.
At noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Day participants gather in the lobby of building 7 at MIT. Recent Hunts have had around 20-25 teams participating, with each team containing as few as five and as many as fifty puzzle solvers (larger teams usually send a small delegation to the opening festivities). The organizers present a short skit which reveals the theme of the hunt, such as Carmen Sandiego in 1999 or the Wizard of Oz in 2000. The theme is always a closely guarded secret before the Hunt begins. The teams are then told to find the coin in the context of the theme. For instance, in 1999 teams were told to find a rare coin that Carmen Sandiego had stolen. The first round of puzzles is handed out (in recent years a URL has been provided in lieu of paper copies) and teams return to their headquarters around campus.
Each round consists of somewhere between six and fifteen puzzles. The answer to each puzzle is usually a word or phrase. When a team thinks they know the answer to a puzzle, they call it in to Hunt headquarters, and the Hunt organizers confirm it. The set of all answers in a round form a meta-puzzle. There are no instructions to the meta-puzzle; once a team has all the answers, they still need to figure out what to do with them. The answer to the meta-puzzle is usually another word or phrase. When a team correctly calls in the answer to the meta-puzzle they are finished with that round.
A Hunt is usually comprised of four to eight rounds. Each round is released at a predetermined time, but are released early to teams that finish all previous rounds. Some recent Hunts have had "hidden" rounds, or different ways of combining puzzles into metapuzzles - it's all up to the team writing the Hunt. When a team has finished all the rounds in the Hunt, they begin the final runaround. Usually several teams make it to the final runaround, which may take a couple hours to complete. The first team to complete the runaround and find the coin wins the Hunt and starts planning for next year!
Types of puzzles
Any type of puzzle is fair game. There are regular crosswords, cryptic crosswords, logic puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, connect-the-dots, ciphers, riddles, paint by numbers, and word searches. There are puzzles that require the knowledge of quantum mechanics, stereoisomers, ancient Greek, Klingon, Bach preludes, coinage of Africa, and Barbie dolls. Some puzzles are pictures, others are audio files or physical objects. Many puzzles require sending people to find certain locations on the MIT campus or in the Boston area. There is usually a scavenger hunt and a puzzle that involves bringing food to the team running the Hunt (one privilege of winning). Other puzzles involve playing games such as four square or video games. Many of the puzzles require an in-depth knowledge of MIT's campus and culture.
History
The Mystery Hunt was started in 1980 by then-graduate student Brad Schaefer. The first Hunt consisted of 12 subclues on a single sheet of paper including a Vigenere cipher, a short runaround, and an integral. The answers to the subclues detailed the location of an Indian Head penny hidden on campus. The individuals who found the coin were allowed to take their pick of a $20 gift certificate to the school bookstore, a $50 donation to the charity of their choice, and a keg of beer.
The hunt was organized again by Brad Schaeffer for the next two years. After he graduated, the winners were given the honor of writing the hunt the next year.
Over the next several years the hunt became longer and more involved as the number of participants increased. The 1984 Hunt had 22 clues, and the 1987 Hunt had 19 clues and a final runaround. The Mystery Hunt has continued to grow, with the 2005 Hunt containing 114 puzzles, 12 meta-puzzles and a 6-puzzle final runaround. The winners were awarded a cash prize until at least 1987.
Eventually the Hunt became themed. The earliest recorded theme is Captain Red Herring's Mystery Island in 1992. By the mid-nineties the modern Hunt structure of rounds and meta-puzzles had been solidified.
Memorable events
"Be noisy"
The 2002 Hunt was based on the game of Monopoly; each round consisted of puzzles whose answers referred to a space on the Monopoly board, and by collecting these spaces, teams could form Monopolies and eventually gain access to additional "house" puzzles, as well as the "hotels", which were metapuzzles. After completing all eight hotel puzzles, teams were informed that they were in "jail" and had to procure a Get Out Of Jail Free card to proceed.
In fact, the way to get this card could be found as a hidden second solution to an earlier regular puzzle, but the teams didn't know about this. Several teams found the phrase "BE NOISY" hidden as a diagonal acrostic in the hotel puzzle answers, and proceeded to "be noisy" outside hunt headquarters. The acrostic message was entirely accidental, and the hunt organizers were rather confused by this behavior. Eventually this confusion was cleared up and the Hunt continued to its conclusion.
Puzzles in later hunts have made reference to this incident, sometimes including the phrase "be noisy" in a red herring solution. In 2003, the phrase "be noisy" was again hidden as an acrostic in the metapuzzle answers, but intentionally this time, and the actual "meta-meta-solution" was a different acrostic.
Jofish's Pants
When they won the 2002 Hunt, some members of ACME told people that the coin would be hidden the next year in team member Jofish's pants. In fact the coin was hidden in Jofish's pants; they just weren't on him at the time. As The Tech, MIT's student newspaper, memorably put it: "The coin had been hidden in Jofish's (Joseph N. Kaye's '98) pants, on the top of some pipes in the basement of building 16."
Physical Plant
In 2003, some speculation says, MIT Physical Plant, the department in charge of janitorial work and facilities maintanence (and now known as the Department of Facilities), found the coin partway through the Mystery Hunt. Not knowing this story, the team from Random Hall coincidentally named their team "Physical Plant" in 2004 and 2005, in the hopes that the Hunt web site would read "The coin has been found by Physical Plant" in a subsequent year. The Random Hall team won the Mystery Hunt in 2005, resulting in the appearance of the phrase.
According to members of ACME, the team that wrote the 2003 Hunt, the story is apocryphal; Physical Plant (the MIT department) did not actually find the coin.
External links
- Official Mystery Hunt website (http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/)