cananian

This past weekend was the 26th annual MIT Mystery Hunt, my 8th hunt, and my second with the pterrific Pturnips. The hunt was very elegant and well-constructed, although I didn't see quite as many stand-out terrific puzzles---perhaps because I just didn't work on as many puzzles this year. It was also short, as hunts go -- barely 36 hours long -- although that's certainly better than the Tuesday morning hunt past years have seemed to foretell!

One of my favorite puzzles this year was Blue Steel, although the puzzle's solution meant that many (most) teams took an easy and obvious shortcut to the answer. I also spent some enjoyable time on Pentris, although it was really a one-aha puzzle with a completely straightforward programming solution. I tend to prefer puzzles where the existence of a good program is not so obvious, or where multiple programming strategies might be employed. Square Mess is a reasonable example from last year, although its constructor neglected to consider that people would be using dictionaries different from his own. Too Precious For Words from the 2004 hunt is the puzzle I am most proud of programming to solve.

Quick list of puzzles I worked on: Ask Ye Silly Question (wrote solving program), Blue Steel, Disarray (didn't manage to solve; I don't think A=1 was clued well enough), Louder Than Words (didn't manage to solve; clueing was obscure), Long Division (didn't manage to solve; probably should have looked for outlines, but xor admits multiple ways to get the target letters out), Pentris (wrote solving program), All for One and One for All (solved after hunt).

Puzzles I didn't work on which looked like fun: Badness 10000 (adventure and bugs), Do Sa Do (square dancing!), Some Trolleys Named Lust (packet assembly, etc), Surely You're Hexing (feynmen jigsaw), American Championship (automated scrabble search?), Head of Sales (mit puzzle).