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More puzzles, less sleep | MIT Technology Review


The “hydra” we’re dealing with is a meta-puzzle: we have to find a way to use solutions from other puzzles we’ve already solved to derive another answer. If we solve this one, we’ll be rewarded with more puzzles.

We know that we need to diagram the answers for this round of puzzles as a binary tree. In keeping with the mythological analogy of the hydra meta-puzzle, each time we solve one puzzle, two more branch out until we have a diagram five levels deep. We still lack the answers to several unsolved puzzles that would help us understand how the diagram works and how to derive the answer to the meta-puzzle. The diagram we have drawn, in green chalk, becomes increasingly chaotic with each addition, deletion and note we stamp on the overcrowded board. But we can feel that we are only one “aha!” far from a solution.

MIT’s Mystery Hunt has challenged puzzle enthusiasts every year since Brad Schaefer ’78, PhD ’83, wrote 12 “sub-clues” on a single sheet of paper as a challenge to friends during the Independent Activity Period (IAP) in 1981. The answers led solvers to an Indian Head penny that hid in the campus. Today’s Hunts are still built around that basic concept, but what constitutes a challenge has changed over four decades. One of the clues from the original 1981 Hunt is just the missing word in the quote: “He that plays the king will be _____; his majesty will have tribute from me.” It’s easy to Google these days, but in 1981, even if you knew it was Shakespeare, if you didn’t notice the subtle hint that you should look for a play-related character within the play, it might have taken hours of flipping through the Bard’s collected works to find found the answer.

a group of people looking at a person writing on a blackboard.
The Setec Astronomy team is trying to find out if the human knot they’ve gotten themselves into can be untied.

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

We will be adding a few more solutions to the hydra diagram over the next few hours. Finally one notices that all the answers on the fifth level of the diagram seem to have a strange prevalence of Ls and Rs. This is an “aha!” moment: They tell us how to navigate a binary tree. From the first node at the top of the tree, we trace the Ls and Rs in the order in which they appear in each of the 16 solutions at the fifth level. Take the left branch, then the right, then the left again, landing on a word that starts with H. The second answer of level five leads us to a word that starts with E. Repeating the process with all 16 answers gives a convenient way to deal with the hydra: “THE HEAD FIGHT IN HEAD.” (Puzzle solutions are traditionally capitalized, with no spaces or punctuation.) Those of us who solved the puzzles take a moment to bask in our victory before we split up and find new puzzles to work on.


Some elements of the Mystery Hunt are hard to describe, the kind of must-see ingenuity that also inspires the hacks on the Great Dome and the countless above-and-beyond engineering projects displayed around campus each year. Most of the puzzles are completely unique, although they often include logic and word problems as well as more common elements like crosswords, sudoku and Wordle. But almost anything can be turned into a puzzle. For example, chess puzzles can be combined with the Magic: The Gathering card game. Or solvers might be asked to organize a Git repository with 10,000 out-of-order commits (that is, find the exact sequence of 10,000 changes to a file as tracked in a version control system), identify duets from musicals, or draw on their knowledge of pop culture trivia .

For most of its history, the Mystery Hunt had no official status on campus. By tradition as with any organizational effort, the teams simply showed up in lobby 7 on the Friday before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. for the kickoff. In 2014 MIT Puzzle Club was established to help provide year-to-year continuity and other support, such as providing room for teams to work in and reserving Kresge Auditorium for commencement ceremonies. The Puzzle Club also hosts other events, such as mini puzzle scavengers and sudoku and logic puzzle competitions—which Becca Chang ’26, the club’s current president, says has “helped a lot in reaching new students or anyone who might be interested [puzzles].”

Technology has allowed Mystery Hunt 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 take on the responsibility of writing and running events. Today is a one-year commitment for the winning team to design a hunt for the following year. For this, it is necessary to manage creative outputs and a technological infrastructure that can be compared to a small company. Duties include spending thousands of hours writing and testing puzzles, constructing physical puzzles and props, and building a dynamic website that can handle the massive influx of puzzle-seeking visitors.

a group of people in a classroom
Today’s hunts are built around story. Here, John Bromels as the god Neptune checks on the progress of the galactic trendsetters in bringing back the god Pluto after his planet has been degraded.

JADE CHONGSATHAPORNPONG ’24/MIT TECHNIQUE

Just organizing a team of solvers can be a huge undertaking, especially now that more and more participants are joining remotely. Anjali Tripathi ’09, who started the I’m Not a Planet Either team in 2015, was introduced to riddle hunting through Simmons Hall’s Miniature Mystery Hunt for first years. After competing in the main event with Simmons’ on-campus team as a student, she competed in the distance for the first time in 2010. “I was overseas in England and I still wanted to do the Hunt, and I remember how hard it was,” she says. . The team “didn’t have the infrastructure for that.”



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