MIT Mystery Hunt 2011 —
Well, that was unexpected — the Mystery Hunt team I’ve hunted with for the past three years, Codex, won the hunt this year! It’s the team’s tenth year of competing and our first win. Congrats to everyone! Here’s a Boston Globe article about the whole thing.
The hunt organizers did a beautiful job putting together the hunt (it took an estimated 20,000 person-hours), and the laser-etched “coin” we won the hunt by finding at 6am on Sunday morning was a reflection of how much effort had gone into the hunt in general:
The coin!
Of course, this means that now it’s our turn to write the hunt — as Scott says, our free time for the next year has just vanished. It’ll be fun, though; it’s always sad when the hunt ends and you realize you aren’t going to get to hang out with the awesome people you just spent a sleepless weekend solving puzzles with until next year, but having to meet up regularly to write and test the puzzles for next year will fix that. We’ve got a very high bar to live up to, and a thirty-year-old tradition to keep alive.
(Oh, yeah, geekiest moment of the hunt: one of the puzzles — Redundant Obsolescence — involved plugging an Iomega Zip drive into my desktop PC via parallel port and reading files back off it, in Linux. I couldn’t believe it worked.)
While I’m here and blogging, here’s a guitar video I recorded over Christmas. I’m happy I finally got to record a Kaki King piece.
Kaki King – Goby (youtube, download in Ogg Theora)