More puzzles, less sleep | MIT Technology Review

The Hydra we’re dealing with is a meta-puzzle: we have to find a way to extract more answers using solutions to other puzzles we’ve already solved. If we solve this puzzle, we will be rewarded with more puzzles.

We know we need to plot the answers to this round of the puzzle as a binary tree. In keeping with the mythological analogy of the Hydra meta-puzzle, each time we solved a puzzle, it branched off into two more branches until we had a five-level-deep chart. We are still missing answers to several unsolved puzzles that will help us figure out how the graph works and how to extract answers to the meta-puzzle. The diagrams we drew in green chalk became more confusing with every addition, deletion, and annotation we made on the crowded blackboard. But we can feel like we’re just an “aha!” away from a solution.

The MIT Mystery Hunt has been an annual challenge since Brad Schaefer ’78, PhD ’83 wrote 12 “sub-clues” on a piece of paper as a challenge to his friends during the 1981 Independent Activity Period (IAP). Puzzle lover. Today’s hunting still revolves around this basic concept, but the composition of the challenge has changed in four decades. One of the clues to the original 1981 “Hunter” is just one word missing from the quote: “The man who plays the king shall be _____; His Majesty shall pay me tribute.” Today it’s easy to figure out with Google, but in 1981, even You know it’s Shakespeare, and if you don’t notice the subtle hint that you should look for a character referring to the play within a play, it could take hours.

We’ll be adding more solutions to the Hydra diagram over the next few hours. Eventually someone noticed that all the answers in the fifth level of the chart seemed to have a strange Ls and Rs prevalence. This was the “aha!” moment: they showed us how to navigate binary trees. Starting from the first node at the top of the tree, we trace L and R in the order in which they appear in the 16 solutions at level five. Take the left branch, then right, then left again to land on a word starting with H. You can find a suitable way to deal with Hydra: “Head-Headed Battle”. (Answers to puzzles are traditionally written in all caps, with no spaces or punctuation.) Those of us who have been solving puzzles take a moment to enjoy our victories before branching out to find new puzzles to solve.

Some elements of Mystery Hunt are difficult to describe, and this must-see ingenuity also inspired the Hacking of the Great Dome and the many otherworldly engineering projects displayed around campus each year. Most puzzles are completely unique, although they often include logic and word problems as well as more mainstream elements like crosswords, Sudoku, and Wordle. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, a chess puzzle might be combined with the card game Magic: The Gathering. Or a solver might be asked to organize a Git repository of 10,000 out-of-order commits (i.e., find the correct order of 10,000 changes to a file tracked in a version control system), identify a duet in a musical, or draw Their knowledge of pop culture trivia.

For most of its history, mystery hunting had little official status on campus. As per tradition, as with any organizational endeavor, the team simply showed up in Hall 7 for kickoff on the Friday before the Martin Luther King holiday. 2014, MIT Puzzle Club Established to help provide year-to-year continuity and other support, such as providing workspace for the team and reserving the Kresge Auditorium for the opening ceremony. The Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini-puzzle hunts, Sudoku, and logic puzzle competitions—“which go a long way in reaching new students or anyone who might be interested,” said current club president Becca Chang ’26. [puzzles]”.

Technology has allowed mystery hunting to grow and evolve in significant ways, and not just in terms of the types of puzzles possible. By the mid-1990s, one person could assume responsibility for writing and running the campaign. Today, the winning team committed to designing next year’s hunt. Doing so requires managing creative output and technology infrastructure comparable to that of a small business. Responsibilities include spending thousands of hours writing and testing puzzles, building physical puzzles and props, and building a dynamic website that can withstand the influx of puzzle visitors.

Just organizing a team of solvers can be a daunting task, especially now that more and more participants are joining remotely. Anjali Tripathi ’09, who founded the I Am Not a Planet team in 2015, learned about mystery hunting through mini-mystery hunts for first-year students in Simmons Hall. As an undergraduate, she first competed remotely in 2010 after completing the main event on campus with the Simmons team. “I was in the UK and still wanted to do Hunter, and I remember how difficult it was,” she said. The team “didn’t have the infrastructure in place.”