Puzzle Hunt 2011 Write-up
Preface:
The first thing I want to do, is take some time to thank all of the people who made this thing possible (Neo, Infil, QB, and whoever else I'm forgetting).
Having dabbled, oh so very briefly (and I admit unsuccessfully), in puzzle-making myself I know that a lot of blood sweat and tears went in to making this happen.
Accordingly, I want to express my sincere gratitude to those individuals who worked tirelessly on this hunt and let them know that their efforts are appreciated.
Now, any criticism I may have in my writeup should in no way be thought of as a slight to these people; however, feel free to cherish any praise I may give.
Knowing that, I intend to be open and honest about my experience in the hopes that future puzzle hunts (yes please!) may only build upon the success of this one.
So, without any further ado, let's move on to the puzzles!
Woops, sorry. A few more things. I have only competed in two other puzzle hunts with the Elite in the past (and with anyone for that matter). I worked on a SUMS hunt and a CISRA hunt, but only spent any significant amount of time working on the SUMS hunt. I did greatly enjoy my experiences in these hunts and, for whatever reason, I did not participate in the previous Elite puzzle hunts. However, I did briefly look over the old puzzles and the results.
Based on what I saw from previous Elite hunts, I was expecting a much different experience. I was honestly expecting puzzles that were going to take only a few minutes to an hour to solve (for the average Elite puzzler and possibly only 45 seconds for Snap). Boy was I (but in a good way) wrong! Clearly, the puzzle architects clearly stepped up their game this year. Which leads us right into...
1. Egyptian Architecutre
Spoiler
I was expecting this to be five-minute solve where every tick of the clock was crucial. Imagine my dismay when I was nearly an hour deep into this first brain-tickler. I stared at this thing every which way but could make no sense of it. At one point I was trawling through Google image results to see if the shape of the original puzzle text matched some obscure Egyptian building or statue. Ha! I tried ordering, and reordering the rows but to no avail. Several times I had them in the correct order but the white space was killing me. At one point I even anagrammed the first column of letters and got something very close to what I was supposed to get. Eventually, I figured out that the white-space was a red herring (Hey, I thought every little piece of information - even whitespace - was going to be important) and was able to progress quickly from there - just missing the one hour mark. Infil later informed me about reading down the center column of letters and I feel pretty stupid for not seeing that on my own. Anyway, I'm fairly sure I had the answer for a couple of minutes prior to my solve as I was trying to do something with the rest of the letter of the second pyramid. Luckily, I remembered that guessing doesn't count against you and I was able to edge out team Come Third by a mere 9 seconds. Not only that, I finished only second to Snap. Not a bad start for my first ever Elite Puzzle Hunt solve! Unfortunately, this would be the peek of my hunt in terms of placing prowess...
2. Split the Difference
Spoiler
I didn't have much trouble with this puzzle with the exception of mixing up a word here and there for an equally valid alternate word. My time really reflects that there were 28 sentences to parse and 28 words to come up with and then finish the puzzle. At this point I was still working by myself and my time here reflects that. Ignoring the outlier, working on a puzzle like this, which doesn't require all that much lateral thinking, by yourself is a clear disadvantage as splitting up the work would have been a huge time saver. Having said that, I'm happy with my solve time having finished faster than one of the stronger 2-man teams and nearly besting another.
3. Jungftak
Spoiler
This is another puzzle where it was fairly obvious what to do right from the beginning but just required a ton of research and Googling and being one-man down was clearly not an optimal strategy. I was able to come up with some of the more obvious titles from the get go but not being a huge movie buff, I had to do quite a bit of trawling through IMDB. Unfortunately, I only learned about oracleofbacon.org after I solved this one. Oh well, bookmarked for next time.
4. Divisb-L
Spoiler
Despite what my completion time may suggest, I really did enjoy this puzzle (it's probably in my top 3 favorite puzzles). I'm usually very good with these logic types of puzzles that don't require coming up with word play or looking up random facts on the internet. I decided quickly that I was going to print this one out and work with a pencil to solve it. Well, it took some time for me to track down some printer paper (yay for thinking ahead!) and I hit a bit of a snag on the second step. I had the first part down in a breeze. However, I made a fatal error in transcribing the puzzle into Excel. I inadvertantly forgot to highlight the F in the originally highlighted L piece. This didn't effect the first step as that piece was already outlined and for whatever reason I never caught on to it. When I removed the even rows and re-printed the puzzle that F was still white instead of grey and it took me nearly 20-30 minutes of futiliy trying to solve the second part before I realized what happened. Awesome! Apart from that, I really, really enjoyed this one.
5. My Dear Watson
Spoiler
Oh boy, where to begin. I'm fairly certain this was my first exposure to cryptic crosswords. Taking the clue from the title, I had all of the elements, and their symbols ranscribed within the 5 minutes of starting the puzzle. I then proceded to spend the next 3 hours trying desperately to make sense of the cryptic crossword clues. I think I may have had 2 or 3 of them correct and a couple of solid attempts. My favorite incorrect guess was - "Log 100 or enveloped by rouge. (6)" for which I originally had "TULIPS" which I think I should get at least partial credit for. At this point, I ran out of time and had to leave for the day, as I was attending the Blizzard Holiday party that evening. On the car ride there, I was talking with my friend who invited me and telling him about the puzzle hunt. He said it sounded interesting and he agreed to join me as the 2nd person of my team. Luckily for me, he had some experience with crypitc crosswords and with his help we were able to work together the next day and solve it.
6. Interplanetary Message
Spoiler
This was probably my favorite puzzle of the hunt. This was the first puzzle where I worked with my friend from the outset. I took the job of making sense of the names and he took the job of trying to make sense of the "blocks". I had the asteroids and their #s within just a few minutes of Google and Wiki-fu. I noticed the patterns in the "prelim result" numbers of the 1-7 and 7-1 in digits 1 and 4 and my friend came up with the encoded "ARECIBO" in digits 2 and 3. In trying to decipher the "blocks" he immediately went to Binary, where I admit I would have jumped to at first as well. After he discovered "ARECIBO" in the first column of numbers I was almbost positive that we were going to be getting a similar message in the resulting numbers. Looking back, I feel so dumb for not realizing more quickly that they were the numbers encoded in the Arecibo Message. I have looked at the Arecibo Message wiki entry main times previously but I didn't immediately recall the number constructions being different than standard binary constructions. After a sudden moment of clarity, I realized that we shouldn't be looking for an embeded message like in the first set of numbers but rather to use that embedded message to construct the 2nd set. After that epiphany, the rest of the pieces fell in to place rather quickly. Being a huge astronomy and cosmology nerd I immensely enjoyed this puzzle but am also a little ashamed about how long it took us to solve it.
7. The Band's All Here
Spoiler
This is a bit lengthy so here's a TLDR: Got almost to the end and got stuck for over 2 days. Discovered a slight "flaw" in the puzzle design (see: http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight (http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight)) and ended up having to use hints. I offer a critique at the hint system at the end.
Having just looked at the 2010 hunt puzzles and between Infil playing it in VA to his XBOX puzzle in 2010, before we even started the puzzle I had a good feeling that that this was a Rock Band/Guitar Hero puzzle. And I was not disappointed... well maybe only by our performance. We quickly set to work collecting information about these songs. We accumulated artist, titles and album info. We shortly realized that these were all in fact Rock Band songs and were quickly on to the "hard" clue in the title. Within 20-30 minutes we had all of the pertinent song data and band/instrument difficulty data transcribed in our worksheet. Perhaps I was to conditioned by QB and his penchant for indexing into text that threw me off for so long. My first thought was to try indexing using the "Band" difficulty rating into the Song Title. I then tried it with artist and album and even the original lyric. Then I tried adding back in the white space and special characters. Then I tried the different instruments and then I tried sorting and then I tried... well you get the picture. I indexed the shit out of this puzzle.
We had noticed that there was one instrument difficulty for each song that matched the original puzzle group. With the exception of Limelight. It was only after talking to QB after the puzzle that I realized I was using the Rock Band page for the COVER version of Limelight and there was actually two versions of the Song available on Rock Band site(http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight (http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight) vs. http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight2 (http://www.rockband.com/songs/limelight2)). Well, in an attempt to speed up the process I tried directly entering the song names in the URLs (e.g. http://www.rockband.com/songs/movealong (http://www.rockband.com/songs/movealong)) and that's how I ended up with the cover version of Limelight. I'm not saying that this is what kept us from solving the puzzle without using hints as other teams were able to do it. I'm just a little frustrated by the fact that it could have meant the difference in that epiphany coming but that's a moot point. Like I said, I did notice that there was a strong connection between 1 istrument rating per puzzle group but I was more hung up on the exception than the correlation with the rest of the songs and their groupings.
Anyway, we struggled with the final step of this puzzle for at least 2 days (perhaps more) without taking a hint and I spent a lot of time trying to make sense of it. Did you know that every lyric in the puzzle contains at least one pronoun? Yes, I even tried indexing using the person of each pronoun in the lyrics (I/me = 1, you = 2, etc.). We had eventually broken down and taken a hint on another puzzle so I finally gave in and decided to take hints here. Unfortunately, I knew that we were going to have to take multiple hints because typically a hint only helps you past the initial starting point which we were well passed.
Regarding hint taking: here is a suggestion that should be considerd for future puzzle hunts. Instead of having 3 hints that must be taken in order, why not consider having N hints for each logical step, leap or phase in the puzzle. I think it should be plausible to reveal hints about a certain phase of the puzzle without revealing too much about the rest of the puzzle if the hints are taken out of order. Alternatively, perhaps an email to an admin describing your progress on a puzzle and requesting a hint could result in the admin telling you which hint to take. I bring this up because I feel a bit cheated because we ended up having to take all 3 hints when realistically the first 2 hints were of no use to us. We were exactly where we were before taking the first two hints after we received them. On the other hand, it would be possible that someone could spend maybe 5 minutes and request all 3 hints and be at the same place where we ended up even though we were able to progress farther on the puzzle and invest much more time on the puzzle than a team that just flippantly decided to use all 3 hints from the very beginning.
8. Where Dream's Come True
Spoiler
Having already completed My Dear Watson, we immediately recognized the cryptic crosswords. I'm not sure what makes this puzzle "Hard" when MDW is considered "Medium". Aren't they essentially the same puzzle? Anyway, nothing really special to say about this puzzle other than it helped me to sharpen up my cryptic crossword skills and we were able to solve it much more quickly than MDW as a result of having exposure to that puzzle first.
9. Set
Spoiler
This was definitely the most cerebral puzzle in the hunt and probably in my top 3 along with Arecibo and Divisib-L. At first I thought that finsihing the game was going to be the entire puzzle. I felt that the game timer was at a fair level. Having never played before, it didn't take that long in order to complete the game although it wasn't so trivial that we got it on the first try. After completing the game we began trying to solve the results page. We both agreed that we were supposed to use the cards somehow to draw out something on cards.html. We spent some time trying to draw out shapes using the just cards themselves. We then noticed that there were 3 sets each between the cards on all 4 rows and we wasted some more time messing around with that. After racking our brains for over a day (and having already taken hints on Double Header) we decided to move forward with hints.
This is another puzzle where we kind of got shafted by the hint system. The first hint was completely useless to us. However, the 2nd hint about the missing cards was enough to get us where we needed to be. My hats off to the few teams that were able to solve this one with no hints. In my judgement, this was probably the hardest, yet fair, puzzle of the hunt.
10. Scary Number Puzzle
Spoiler
This was another well constructed and enjoyable puzzle. I guess it's safe to say that QB enjoys his cryptic crosswords! This puzzle would have ranked higher for me had it not been for the 3rd damn time we had to solve cryptics. However, I did enjoy the other components of the puzzle and hey they all came together. Solving the orthogonal path was enjoyable as was figuring out that the cryptic answers were to be placed in that grid and finally, having to find the other set of standard crossword clues made this is a very well crafted puzzle that incorporated a lot of different elements. My hat is off to QB for sure as I can imagine it would take a lot of time to make this all come together. If I did have one critique to offer it's that some of the standard crosswords were a bit to generic or ambiguous. We quickly gathered that the generic crossword answers were going to be in alphabetic order. However, even with that knowledge there were still some combinations of words that seemingly worked with both the generic clues as well as the alphabetic ordering. I know that solving all of the cryptics makes it a lot easier to figure out the standard clues but there were 2 or 3 cryptics that stumped us for quite some time (damn you Prim Jimmy!). My other favorite wrong CC solve was: "Ticket part found in debut show returned. (4)" to which I initially had "PLOT". Thankfully, after enough perserverence we were able to solve all the cryptics and the rest fell into place rather nicely. All in all, an enjoyable puzzle.
11. Doubleheader
Spoiler
Ah, Doubleheader. No offense QB, because you seriously did a terrific job creating all these puzzles, but this was my least favoirte puzzle. Part of the problem with this puzzle is that Baseball games have such a huge dataset to mine through. I figured the first part had something to do with the pitchers, but which pitchers? Some games can have upwards of 10 pitchers! I figured, from the title, it had to be the winning pitchers. Right? Wrong. The starting pitchers. OK, well I didn't even bother to check if they were the same. It probably didn't help that I was so exhausted from trying to index-mine data from Infil's Rock Band puzzle that by this point the prospect of trying to do the same thing here with posisbly an exponentially larger data set didn't seem to exciting a prospect. Eventually, we ended up breaking down and decided to use the first hint of the puzzle here. Luckily, the first hint was actually of some use to us (huzzah!). Unfortunately, we were still stick with the second piece. After trying to Google these potential games we came to the realization that they were games that had not actually been played or scheduled. Again, I tried index-mining on the team names and cities but to no avail. I also tried grouping them by starting time even before taking the 2nd hint. However, actually mapping them out never really occurred to me. After taking the 2nd hint and actually getting no help from it I just started to Google random stuff about Vernon Wells. I probably guessed about 20 differnt things like "FOOTBALL", "QUARTERBACK", etc. Eventually, I went back to indexing and sorting and grouping and I ended up with something that looked almost legible. It said something like "CONES AL ... TAIL CALM SONIC" or something like that. So I googled "Vernon Wells" +sonic. And just happened upon the IMDB page for Mad Max 2: Road Warrior. And lo and behold, sitting there flipping me the bird was actor Vernon Wells. After several guesses we finally landed on the right answer.
All in All, I definitely had a great time and I look forward to the next hunt. I am satisfied that we only used hints on 3 of the puzzles and on each of those puzzles we only ended up being able to use 3 hints (even though we were docked for 7). My biggest critique and suggestion would be to reevaluate how hints are handled. If I were to rank the puzzles in terms of difficulty I would rank them like this:
Easy - Split the Difference
Easy - Jungftak (but time consuming)
Easy - Divisb-L
Medium - Egyptian Architecture (this had the biggest first leap of any puzzle in my estimation, not really the best puzzle to ease into a hunt with, otherwise I enjoyed it)
Medium - Interplanetary Message
Medium - Where Dreams Come True
Medium - My Dear Watson
Medium - The Band's All Here
Hard - Double Header (not so much hard but rather the potential data-set is daunting)
Hard - Scary Number Puzzle
Hard - Set (solving the puzzle and drawing on the cards page weren't terribly difficult, but making the leap from the result page to finding the missing set cards was a real head-scratcher)
I am mostly new to puzzle hunting, and I enjoyed participating in the elite hunt. Thanks Infil, QB, Neo, & Gabby. I appreciate your efforts.
My only puzzle exp before the elite hunt was dabbling in the recent SUMS, perhaps contributing to a solve or two there. It was enough to get me familiar with puzzling. The elite hunt was a good natural progression from that. In other words, my puzz-fu just leveled up a couple of times.
Thoughts on puzzles:
1. Egyptian Architecutre
Spoiler
A cool starter. I instantly figured out how to arrange the strings at the beginning, and then was stuck for a while creating a pyramid "IN THIS FASHION". I had been trying to stack the four answers from least characters to most. Which was stupid. So I slept on it, and the next day I realized the folly of my ways.
Spoiler
Good times. Nice sense of accomplishment after getting each pair. Thought it was funny that I arrived at MUTE/CUTE for a pair in the 2nd stanza. (the one about mimes and furry animals). Thought it was some kind of pattern-breaker of the double letters.
Spoiler
Didn't like this puzzle. I dislike the variety of puzzle that requires lots of busy work, especially as a one-man team. Conceptually the puzzle is cool though.
Spoiler
My favorite puzzle of the hunt! My mind was blown that taking out half the rows resulted in another working board. An extra awesome touch was that the original board spelled out some words, just for fun... that didn't end up mattering one iota. Bravo! Feel like I should have been faster. I learned to start in the corners pretty quickly, so I'm just stupid for taking as long as I did.
Spoiler
My first experience with CCs ever. (Hence, I needed the first hint to even know what the hell was going on). I feel pretty good about my time there, since half of it was researching how to solve CCs, and the other half was applying my newly minted knowledge. LOL that I didn't make the elemental connection until solving about 70% of the clues... and only after thinking of cobalt blue. There were way more obvious ones out there.
Spoiler
Awesome puzzle. I don't get the hate. I had a pretty funny experience with this puzzle. I'm too noobish to realize that ARECIBO was clued (didn't realize to check this sort of thing).... so I was stuck on figuring out the numeric encoding of the symbols on my own. It's funny because I tried about six or seven encodings, many of which were incredibly close to the Arecibo numbers, but no dice on any of them. Long story short, as a last resort I googled "SETI transmission", per the title of the puzzle, and arrived at the Arecibo wiki page, which showed me the way.
Spoiler
Disliked this puzzle for two reasons. The first is that it clearly falls into the busy work style of puzzles I've already decided I do not like (and Rock Band's website was irksome). But on top of that, I actually did every single thing this puzzle required EXCEPT obtain the solution. It was disheartening to have done all that work and not realize how to finish. The absolute worst feeling was conceding I needed a hint, taking all three, and finding that they described steps I'd already performed. This is where my inexperience with hunting hurt me--didn't think to try different indexing methods. But hey, important lesson learned! If I try to remain objective, I can appreciate the craftiness of this puzzle.
Spoiler
More fun CCs. By this point I'm getting more comfortable with both CCs and puzzle hunting in general.
Spoiler
Never played Set before, it was really fun! Beating 15m felt like a cool accomplishment. Then, I solved the rest of the puzzle (needing the third hint), and came away feeling awesome about myself. To me, that is the mark of a great puzzle: How clever do you feel having solved it. This one passed with flying colors
Spoiler
This puzzle is my 2nd favorite of the hunt, probably tied with Set actually. Just every step was really fun to do.
Spoiler
I got as far as getting a baseball-reference tab open for each of the games on the left-hand side of the puzzle. Then NFL football came on. My puzzle hunt was officially over. Looks like it would have been really fun to work out though, similar to the endgame of Set.