Last year I joined a new team, Luck (known then as Luck Luck Goose). It was and is a great team, with great people on it, and my puzzle buddy Jasters joined me… and I had a bad time. I mean, going to the hunt and seeing everyone was great. But I love puzzles and somehow my puzzle solving last year was a train wreck (as I blogged last year). This came as a surprise after two prior years at the Hunt, one amazing and one very good.
So, this year I was a bit worried and cautious. Potentially making things worse was that I made the call in November after a tumultuous year to not fly East for the Mystery Hunt. Multiple people I know told me they’d tried remote-solving before and it had totally sucked. Jasters for example has flown east from LA every year since his crappy year remoting, without hesitation, since he had no fun remoting for his first Mystery Hunt.
I knew that DrSudoku had remoted with Luck last-minute last year. I had never solved with him (or talked to him for more than ten seconds at Bay Area puzzle events), but I still figured solving with a known-excellent solver was better than solving alone. I didn’t know for sure how we’d get along, but fortunately we solved very well together. Although his early indications were that he was heading to Boston, my voodoo doll and shooting-star-wishing worked, and he had to change his plans and stay in the Bay Area. I leapt on the chance to invite him over, he accepted, and I was very happy.
In summary, it felt like my solving went really well. Not perfect… but I did get to do some of my favorite things: pull out the final extraction when people are stuck (more than once)…. do a solo solve beginning to end … do an exciting group solve that is super-collaborative (multiple times on that one)… and rescue someone from a marathon slog puzzle (my buddy Jasters and others, with a tiny piece that got them over a hump.)
I definitely think that being better rested helped. Flying to Boston and sleeping in a hotel always leave me exhausted before the Hunt even starts. Adrenaline overcomes that to some extent, but not fully. More importantly I think, I learned to give up on puzzles that seemed roadblocked and potentially unsolvable by me. It also felt like a lot of the puzzles were… easier. That may be entirely based on being better rested and dropping roadblock puzzles, I’m not sure.
Below is my recollection of my solving experience, as close to the style of this blog as possible. I have chat logs and Google Docs revision histories to reconstruct from, but Google Spreadsheet chat logs are lost. I really wanted to convey details of what my solving was like, what tools I used, how long things took, how Ahas came about, etc. This reconstruction is the best I can do. I won’t take about the hunt overall… I was very focused on one little part at a time and never really took in the structure, themes, plot, etc.
DISCLAIMER: Though this log may seem ‘factual’ I know that I have taken credit for other people’s work. I in no way imagine that the following report is “correct” in the sense that I got all the steps or ahas I feel like I got. I’m sure at least 20% of the things I feel I “solved” were picked up subtly in conversation or simply stolen by my imperfect memories. That’s okay, though. If the sum of our happy “we solved it” feelings is inflated that’s just more happiness to go around.
NOTE: All times PST, since that’s how all my logs are timestamped. Adjusting for Boston time is left as an exercise for the reader.
At 10am the hunt opened up, and my buddy Jasters happened to focus on the same puzzle I did. In the past I’ve thought about how Word Searches keep showing up and I keep being convinced that there are no more ways people can hide interesting puzzles in word searches. I was wrong again; this puzzle was nice. The solve went well, lots of good brainstorming and discussion with Jasters. Jasters (or someone working with him in Boston, I don’t know) got the big ahas and the final extraction. Done at 10:53 PST
Next up was SLASH FICTION. I was the first one in, so I spent my first time through just getting raw data. Then I went back and identified places and recorded clip times. Sometimes you have to be the grunt worker, which is fine… Someone else (everyone showed up ‘anonymous’ in the google spreadsheets, apologies to people who deserve credit) got that they were MIME types. You might ask how I didn’t notice this… but on a team solve it’s okay to just collect the raw data and ignore meaning. Especially if there’s little risk it won’t be needed. The Paris locations were clearly important, and the clip lengths varied so much they seemed important as well.
We noticed the MIME types were in alphabetical order and that helped me help identify some of the tougher ones. I also located some of the tougher Paris spots, as did Laura. I started a Google Map to plot all 20.. but I was saved by
[1/13/2012 12:51:04 PM] Michael F. Booth: what arrondisement are all these places in?
That was all we needed to finish pretty quickly.
MEASURE OF THINGS was in the process of group solving. I didn’t really help, except perhaps by being grumpy about POISE^3 being a unit …. which we were getting because all the data was in but one was wrong (for PUNKY BREWSTER we used SOL). Reminder: don’t trust data just because it’s in a spreadsheet. Rechecking it is usually a quick process. Anyway, someone corrected the error and the puzzle cleaned up nicely and was solved by someone else.
I started looking at the Betsy Johnson Meta around 2:16pm
HOOKWORM/BOOKWORM was seen… I pointed out BIBLIOPHILE/BOOKWORM (which I’m sure others had seen)… at that point the idea was that BOOKWORM/HOOKWORM was “noise” and synonyms were key (2:35pm)
But then…
[1/13/2012 2:38:12 PM] Veep: rhymes? medley.deadly bookworm,hookworm, enticing/splicing?
[1/13/2012 2:39:01 PM] Veep: attached/unmatched
[1/13/2012 2:39:29 PM] DrSudoku: so maybe there are 3 ways to match these words across the letters
[1/13/2012 2:39:39 PM] DrSudoku: flavor text suggests 3
[1/13/2012 2:43:46 PM] DrSudoku: insert some reason = rhyme
[1/13/2012 2:43:55 PM] DrSudoku: add common sense = definition?
[1/13/2012 2:43:57 PM] DrSudoku: so synonym
[1/13/2012 2:44:08 PM] DrSudoku: so “fix a wild word or two”
A couple folks considered anagrams, but then I said:
[1/13/2012 2:45:54 PM] Veep: I don’t think bookworm/backroom is a thing..
[1/13/2012 2:46:56 PM] Veep: cocoon/column? I guess that might work. start/end/length?
That turned out to be correct. At some point in here we had gotten an eighth of the ten round answers, and as a group we had matches for all eight answers … but we couldn’t find the sets that would match the two unknown answers (in order to backsolve, and/or lock in the words for the meta…)
Meanwhile, DrSudoku had made a second tab on the spreadsheet with the one word per row, 1-100, with the used ones highlighted… This was awesome way to show the data (sometimes it’s the little things)…I noticed
[1/13/2012 3:18:03 PM] Veep: #2 are at 5,8,13,21,34… fibonacci?
[1/13/2012 3:18:25 PM] DrSudoku: too good to not mean something
[1/13/2012 3:18:33 PM] DrSudoku: #1 is at triangular
[1/13/2012 3:18:45 PM] Projectyl: Oh that is beautiful. I want to hug that.
[1/13/2012 3:18:57 PM] DrSudoku: #3 is squares
and the momentum (from lots of folks) snowballed to me pulling an answer out of incomplete data:
[1/13/2012 3:23:04 PM] Veep: throw grammar out the window?
[1/13/2012 3:23:16 PM] Veep: most of those words are highlighted :)
I think I saw THROW and GRAMMAR highlighted and guessed words that seemed in the right place from there.
Backsolving was pretty easy from this meta:
[1/13/2012 3:28:17 PM] Jasters: So, the synonym words are GUARDIANS and DELIGHT. The rhyme words are INSPECTORS and TO. The begin/end are JAY and POLITENESS.
Gave us JOY and PROTECTORS and we were done with that round, around 3:30PM
Next I worked on GIBBERISH… /dev/joe (and other folks) joined me. First there was a simple A-Z0-9 cryptogram… easy to make guesses (THE was pretty clear, which is always nice)… I set up a column in Google Spreadsheets with the formula =substitute(substitute(A2,”X”,”t”),”F”,”h”) which I kept nesting as we guessed letters/numbers…
We had the decoding pretty easily, except the numbers of course.. Joe and I indepedently (him before me) found that the phrases were english translations of foreign tongue twisters. There’s a site full of these that he found, and for a while we thought the prefixed numbers in the puzzle corresponded to the ones on that site, because that’s how they’re given there (an unfortunate coincidence). However, once a few weren’t on that site, we abandoned that idea … and finally realized that enough of the tongue twisters had numbers in them that we could solve for all the numbers. Then an answer came out… which we had to encrypt… I was dumb and submitted the wrong option first, but someone else (I’m pretty sure, but I don’t know who, no logs of google spreadsheet chats) pointed out that there was one more step, and I submitted the right guess instead.
So, by 4:45 we had GIBBERISH solved.
I sent this to my buddy Jasters:
[1/13/2012 4:46:20 PM] Veep: I’ve already helped more than last year. I love remoting!
[1/13/2012 5:15:10 PM] Jasters: But wait until you get stuck on a 12 hour solve.
[1/13/2012 5:15:18 PM] Jasters: Like you always do.
[1/13/2012 5:15:55 PM] Jasters: What are you working on?
[1/13/2012 5:21:26 PM] Veep: we’re crushing dawn of a new era.
That solve went pretty well… a bunch of brainstorming in a group chat.. someone suggested mottoes… I googled Acrux, saw it was the star in the Southern Cross… and knowing that that’s a flag feature suggested “flag items” (other people may have/probably suggested flags before/also… it’s hard to remember). We found enough good ones to verify that hunch, and started pulling them out. I went back and made sure we pulled out colors, not just star/stripe, because that felt importnat. After sorting and grouping by color we made morse letters, just as expected. I fixed one data point and guessed one data point and got the final extraction, around 5:35pm. [This is one of those instances where it definitely could have been someone else who actually got us there. ]
Jasters asked for help on Keeping Records, which he had just started… had just seen original plain text OCEAN ENG and COURSE NUMBER. At 5:43 he realized it was Course 13, so rot-13 seemed like a good idea The piece “EXCPTJKBETWTHEQUICK” looked like “EXCPT, BETW TH QUICK” might be important…but then
[1/13/2012 5:49:54 PM] Jasters: 8 9 6 is OCEANENG OLDCOURSE NUMBER
We didn’t know what to do with THEQUICK BROWNFX… til I found
[1/13/2012 5:55:32 PM] Veep: The quick brown fx jmps v lazy dg is that phrase with dupes removed…
by giving hints to Decrypto, after a couple typo-stymied attempts, we get LEXICOGRAPHICAL TRILLIONTH… (6:02)
[1/13/2012 6:08:33 PM] Jasters: vigenere maybe?
[1/13/2012 6:08:52 PM] Jasters: That seems like the next most complicated step?
[1/13/2012 6:09:10 PM] Jasters: Caesar -> single subsitution -> Vigenere -> Polybius or something
we tried using both as key, one as key and one as alphabet key in Vigenere, we tried sorting TRILLIONTH… and lots of other things, but then
[1/13/2012 6:40:11 PM] Veep: I have a theory…
[1/13/2012 6:40:22 PM] Veep: what is the 1 trillionth order of the alphabet, alphabetically?
I downloaded a program that computes such things, got
[1/13/2012 6:42:00 PM] Veep: 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,23,18,20,22,13,14,26,16,17,25,15,21,19,24,12
Used it by manually typing A=A etc into decrypto hints… and got the next iteration. Jasters solved VIGENERE BRASS RATS, and BOYFRIEND STRONGHOLD GODDESS CLUSTER quickly.
The various Beaufort tools we found didn’t all work the same… but he finally found one that worked.
We got to “CARSTARTER LARGE NUMBEROFEARS” at 6:55…
“KEY BIG TWO”… didn’t work but I finally got AUTOKEY (duh) at 7:04.
[1/13/2012 7:19:17 PM] Veep: CLUSTER GODDESS and ALLOY RODENT were solid clues to MIT things
[1/13/2012 7:19:24 PM] Veep: LARGE NUMBER OF EARS must be too
[1/13/2012 7:20:29 PM] Jasters: I’m asking our MIT folk
But Jasters got it himself:
[1/13/2012 7:25:41 PM] Jasters: A search for MIT ears mentions Smoot and the measurement of the Harvard Bridge.
[1/13/2012 7:26:38 PM] Jasters: Does TOTHEUDUDX TOTHEXDX mean anything?
I found the relevant MIT cheer. So know we “know” we had E’s missing… so an E-less cipher was suggested. I kept looking for cipher types we hadn’t used… playfair without the E… there are famous novels without any Es… but by 8:07 I got it, a One-Time-Pad with the digits of the number e. By 8:19 we had the final set of data… but INITIALS DECRYPTED didn’t mean anything… and we still hadn’t used the [sm][ck][e] data, just the lengths…
… and that’s as far as we got, giving up after another 90 minutes of no progress trying to use the smcke letters at this phase of the puzzle. UGH. The puzzle was later backsolved.
Next, I helped the team working on the Bergman meta, since DrSudoku was deep into it and sitting next to me. I got two little nudges to help the process along. First, with more left half tickets than right halves, I read the flavor text which explained that the critic went back to the intersting plays to get both halves of the ticket.
[1/13/2012 10:26:45 PM] Veep: so flavortext says he only has both halves of tickets of interesting shows… I think the 8 that make HUGE CAST are the eight interesting ones. I highlighted them.
And then lastly when we had some unused sets of letters on the right and the eight tickets on the left, but didn’t know how to pair them. I noticed that you could take the letters on the left, plus the given letter on the right, and cover all but one of an unused set on the right…. which allowed us to get final letters out of each row. Other than these two nudges I mostly acted as a listener/questioner for DrSudoku, who powered the team through that meta.
Here’s his summary of the conclusion:
[1/13/2012 10:46:58 PM] DrSudoku: possibly T?A???R?
[1/13/2012 10:47:18 PM] Zebraboy: gotten how?
[1/13/2012 10:47:21 PM] DrSudoku: so Eric got this bit
[1/13/2012 10:47:28 PM] DrSudoku: take out the unused in the row
[1/13/2012 10:47:31 PM] DrSudoku: match to ticket on left
[1/13/2012 10:47:35 PM] DrSudoku: also one more unused
[1/13/2012 10:47:38 PM] DrSudoku: leaves a letter
[1/13/2012 10:47:41 PM] DrSudoku: and the ticket sort of reads ok
[1/13/2012 10:47:50 PM] DrSudoku: UP QUICK KLUTZ, IT’S JUST TWILIGHT
[…]
[1/13/2012 10:48:20 PM] DrSudoku: but T?A???RS has a lot of ok words
[1/13/2012 10:48:26 PM] DrSudoku: well, the S is a guess
[1/13/2012 10:49:36 PM] DrSudoku: I’ll push my random spec of CAST HUGE TV ACTORS
(TV ACTORS was a nice pull… I feel like I helped a bit by discussing with DrSudoku that #2 couldn’t be the two things you’d want it to be, E or R)
At the same time we were solving Critic #3 in the team chat, my buddy Jasters (and others) were silently working on Critic #2 in the room in Boston… and I moved on… to open up AWARD-WINNING POETRY
I figured out what was going on, and asked the main chat for help:
[1/13/2012 11:15:37 PM] Veep: I think “Award-Winning Poetry” is a “find the broadway show tune that goes with these alternate lyrics” first step
which it was… I was not good at it though I have been good at similar puzzles in the past, like the one in 2009 (I think). Fortunately people with a better ear joined in, including one of our resident experts on the topic, Zebraboy.
I think I hung around this solve without really helping with it… I may have been doing other things (eating, maybe)….
After I was done with that the team was asking for more Dodgson meta answers… so DrSudoku and I looked into O Blessed Day… and man that was a lot of hard-to-collect data. Previous attempters had gotten some… we got some more… but man it was slow-going…we soon gave up (at 12:07 am)
I popped in to help the people stuck on “How Hard Can It Be”… and man they were so close… looking at the solution they had it pretty much exactly right. But I was no help, and we never solved it.
By 1:12am (logs are vague here) DrSudoku and I were hard at work on WINNING CONDITIONS. Someone else had spelled out all 10 rules, and mapped out some words failing some rules. I made a new spreadsheet tab and started recording which rules hit which words on which rounds (I liked words like NENE and RAWNESS, and tried to get data at least through round 8) . Eventually I had the mini-aha that only some rules were enabled in each round. (about 1:36am, based on spreadsheet edits).
By 1:45am or so we’d spotted the alternation of rules 3&4, and seen maybe-similar in 7&8, and so we assumed before we really had enough data that 3/4, 5/6, 7/8, and 9/10 were complementary pairs. DrSudoku figured out the on/off patterns that would apply … while I figured out which set of 4 of those 8 rules *could* be satisfied all at once, and by what word… We assumed it would take til round 21 to do that, which the word and rule patterns backed up.
At that point, I was done with my part. DrSudoku did all the work to find the intermediate guess words and correct rounds to get us to round 21… where the word I’d found by grepping for the right length-four word made from [AENR] letters had given me NEAR. We finished around 2:37, so about an 85 minute solve. (We did guess CLOSE earlier… since it met the Meta rules… but close was not close enough).
It turns out this solve helped Jasters … who I believe was *still* working on that Critic #2 meta. Yikes.
I didn’t ping him to find out more, however, as there was a sense in the team that we were close to cracking the Mayan Meta. I tried to help the folks who had been plugging away on GETTING THERE IS HALF THE FUN… and boy, I got nowhere. By 3:14, however, someone was asking for help with Bad Poetry… but I didn’t try that then… there was an untouched puzzle I picked up instead, BLOWING DOWN THE HOUSE.
I did frequencey analysis of the triplets, nothing interesting. I noted that it couldn’t match the frequency given… and I just wandered aimlessly for a bit… but without an aha that puzzle just went nowhere. Gave up around 3:45. (Oh, look, it was huffman-encoded… I considered that concept but didn’t pursue it. That was dumb.) I may have been sleepy. 4am is not a good thinking time.
That said… the next puzzle, THE RAINBOW CONNECTION, was one of my favorite solves of the hunt. The data had been entered into the now-idle spreadsheet 4 hours prior, but I guess they didn’t know what to do with it. I tried morse and some other ideas… But then I cut and pasted the first one (data like “yggy ggboob”) into “Hal’s Cryptogram Helper”, which is my go-to tool for solving substitution ciphers manually. (like the ones in the NPL’s Enigma). The first thing it spits out is a frequency count… I noticed that Indigo and Violet were low, and Orange was highest. Since the alphabet also has a bunch of low frequency things at the end, this spurred me into the aha that the rainbow was in alphabet order. I wrote a script to spit out candidate words and the rest of the puzzle solved cleanly (even though it was 4:30 in the morning). Oh, except for the six final words… DrSudoku had to get that last step, and we were done around 4:45am.
It’s really nice having a smart person sitting next to you. I don’t know if I asked for help or he was eaves-solving… we did lots of both over the course of the hunt.
At the time he was working on SET THEORY, so I got interested in that puzzle. It was mostly done… but I had one big step that got us into the final phase… looking for a word to go with PRESIDENTS in the final phase, I thought of holiday days, thought of MEMORIAL, it matched LINCOLN and whatever WWII battle we wanted, and we were off into the final set… DrSudoku liked LABOR DAY with LABOR UNION, and we decided the film GENRE was STUDENT… and UNION was our answer. Nice rush of momentum there at the end. That was about 5:30am…what to work on next?
At 5:51am someone on the Critic #2 team said “First Dodgson backsolve at long last; sure to be more coming.” I felt sorry for them… but didn’t offer to help.
From 6am-7am… I don’t know. The next thing I can find is my editing the BAD POETRY spreadsheet. Cleaning up some data… finding some movies, flip-flopping a pair of words… I worked on it for quite a bit… we had POE as starting letters which looked great… and couldn’t get it to go anywhere… However, at 4pm … well, that’s 7 hours from now, we’ll get to that.
At 7:36 we got a +/- Kakuro that DrSudoku took on (obviously)… I ‘helped’ in one region which he later had to erase, and then by counting the question marks (twice) and getting 10 instead of 11, so our guesses from partial results had no hope. I hope I did something else during that two hour solve, let’s see…. looks like I kept working on BAD POETRY
So, last year was a downer in many ways, but one of them was that I spent many hours on puzzles we never solved. I tried to avoid that this year, so I bounced off BAD POETRY after too long. (where that could still be hours… my sense of time is way warped during the hunt).
Around 10:10 someone was asking for wikipedia-articled photos… so after quite a bit of time finding a spot nearby (I live in the boondocks) the girlfriend drove me down the road a few miles to Skeggs Point, which was PACKED. We double-parked, hopped out, took a photo, and sent it to my team. By 11:08 I’d cropped to the right size and uploaded it. It’s here.
I helped a bit on General Knowledge but nothing too interesting… then I picked up Eight Digits… tried to solve the simultaneous equations by brute force (all the while strongly feeling that the ‘digits’ refered to the eight home row typing fingers). Fortunately someone solved them in base eight (duh!) which was all DrSudoku and I needed. the keys on the same finger had the same number, the math at the bottom was easy to do (in base 8, obviously), and we were done at 12:53PM… and Jasters’s impeccable timing produced:
[1/14/2012 12:51:44 PM] Jasters: what are you doing?
[1/14/2012 12:53:19 PM] Veep: just finished a puzzle (pending confirm)
[1/14/2012 12:55:21 PM] Jasters: you should help me
[1/14/2012 12:55:48 PM] Jasters: I’ve spent about 10-12 hours off-and-on on the Charles Dodgson meta. I managed to backsolve 5 puzzles from it. And I know exactly how the meta part works.
[1/14/2012 12:55:57 PM] Jasters: But I’m having trouble finishing it.
He gave me good info, but was skeptical about some of the words he’d put in… I was less skeptical since the point values were given to you. I felt like if you matched them, you were good….
[1/14/2012 1:04:35 PM] Jasters: Right now I have AFTER SEA OG which starts off great and then gets bad.
I wrote a script to use the dictionary and spit out words you could make from your rack and whatever letters were on the board. Changing dictionaries on quackle is apparently not a thing you can do easily, so I had to manually try out words…
[1/14/2012 1:44:17 PM] Veep: script finally working
I kept trying to unwind 1-3 steps…
[1/14/2012 2:41:09 PM] Veep: I was thinking AFTER SEA OR QUARTER
Finally after mostly focusing on unwinding I really tried very hard to find a word after GREW. … I finally find READILY that worked after GREW, around 3pm.
That quickly got the team in Boston to:
[1/14/2012 3:10:14 PM] Jasters: AFTER SEA O GRAPH YTH??
[1/14/2012 3:11:44 PM] Veep: http://www.wordnik.com/words/Seaography
[1/14/2012 3:12:05 PM] Jasters: AFTER SEAOGRAPHY THEN?
[1/14/2012 3:12:26 PM] Veep: could be DRAWLING?
[1/14/2012 3:13:18 PM] Jasters: how do you get that?
[1/14/2012 3:13:25 PM] Veep: Seaography: then Drawling
[1/14/2012 3:13:30 PM] Veep: from that page I just sent you to
And I had done my little bit to help my puzzle buddy finally get out of his time sink of a puzzle. It felt good.
Around now I popped back into BAD POETRY, where work had continued. The data was much cleaner, something like POEMVBLOWCAYSTE/AGESUPECTTBOBAD… which I parsed correctly as POEMS BY LOW CASTE / ARE SUBJECT TO BAD …. which was clearly right and got us the final answer, TASTE.
Then, I think DrSudoku was working on “Now I Know My ABCs” so I joined in… I wasn’t much help.
At some point I worked on Raw Bar for a while, but had no clue and we never solved it. I didn’t stay on it too long.
At around 6:30pm I was looking back through past rounds and the Panorama puzzle from critic 4 was still marked high priority (our team organizers did a great job communicating to everyone, including remote, about which puzzles to focus on)…. so I dove in, with help from my lovely girlfriend, who had slept normally the night before. Previous combatants had already identified the photos, (all but one correctly).
I pretty quickly jumped to the idea of the 6 wide + 12 point pictures being semaphore. I plotted them on a Google Map and… they didn’t cluster well with 4 in North America and 2 in South America but I was willing to go with it. … At 6:52 I started recording the sizes of the panoramas (pixel WxH) so I opened them up large… and Laura noticed the compass bearings in the lower right of each. Great, you face that way, you read semaphore… but #5 and #6 gave FI… and #1 was just both pointing up, not semaphore… Darn. ?ONKFI isn’t a thing.
However, the three in Japan/Korea were clearly in a straight line for a reason… and Laura was skeptical about there being four in North America and two in South America… so we verified our data, and fixed the Obelisk in Argentina (not the Washington Monument) around 7:20pm. That made our FI an EY, and the Japanese “12 o’clock” was easily verified (once I stopped being dumb) to be D to go with our ONKEY to make DONKEY, done at 7:23, which I believe helped solve our last meta (I hope… not sure) We got indications around 7:30 that the coin was found… by 7:50 the team in Boston was on the metameta and I bailed to watch football, since remoters can’t really stay in the loop, I knew we weren’t winning, and I was EXHAUSTED.
