It's All Geek to Me!

Oana and I wanted not just to solve puzzles but to make this fun and entice as many of our coworkers to participate as possible. So we sent out emails to everyone in our group and to our trainee classes -- our famed "instant social networks". We attached a sample puzzle from the 2004 Hunt to give people a flavor of what it was like. As poor luck would have it, we picked a puzzle that was quite MIT specific, which seemed to turn off some people. However, we convinced others who had similar reservations that puzzles change every year and the one we sent out as an example wasn't very representative. (As we learned later, we were right.) During the rest of the week leading up to the Hunt, we went around gently prodding people to swing by and stay for a while to look at puzzles. This involved walking up to people you don't frequently speak with, passing the time of day, and telling them how cool it was to solve puzzles. Other honorable efforts included *ahem* appealing to the rather sad-sounding fact that people really had nothing better to do on Friday night than get together with a bunck of geeks and solve puzzles. Of course, not everyone bought it. Still, it was better than nothing... =)

Friday finally dawned. At 6:00 pm, I changed from business casual into my casual T-shirt (to solve puzzles well, you just don't need to be a geek, you need to be well-formed) and headed down with Oana to a training room we had poached specially for the occasion, because of the large number of computers there. Soon enough we were joined by about 6 people, and we went to town on 3 or 4 puzzles.

We sucked.

The puzzles were harder than many people expected. Their solutions also depended on insights a bit more obscure than people expected. Who is to say we didn't have fun, though? Several people stayed till 9:30 or 10:00. A few of us continued working on puzzles till 1:00 am. There was one puzzle which rocked, no pun intended. We had to identify 15 rock songs and then use the opening words to solve a puzzle, whose solution was another rock song. We had had less than amazing luck with the puzzles earlier, but as soon as we knew we were on the right track with this one, our sagging self-esteem was boosted and we were motivated to carry it the rest of the way. Later four of us went out for coffee to a 24 hour diner and exchanged, you guessed it, more puzzles and interview questions as we devoured our late night snacks. In sum, the puzzles we got far on we didn't get right, and the ones we got right, we didn't get too far on. However, at the end of the weekend, it did give me a massive, well-deserved sense of closure to look at all the puzzles and their solutions.

How about you try your hand at them too? https://normalville.org/setec

Mad propz to Alisa and everyone else of Team Uplate. It was great to be able to work on Mystery Hunt with you folks!