THE HUNT IS NOW LIVE! Register if you haven't, then begin solving puzzles!
http://elitepuzzlehunt.patrickjohannessen.com/UPDATE - The hunt date has been set! Let me know your team of 2 as soon as you can. See the second post for the current list.
If you've been in chat at all this year, you may have seen firsthand team The Elite compete in various web-based puzzle hunts. We placed well in the 2009 MUMS, CISRA, and SUMS puzzle hunts, and had a blast doing it. Many different eliters gave their contributions throughout each of these three hunts, and it was enough fun that we've been toying with the idea of running our own miniature version of a puzzle hunt. We finally got off our duffs and did something about it!
The 2010 Elite Puzzle Hunt will be a small competition run over the course of several days, starting on
January 3, 2010. Several eliters who have helped solve in past hunts have flexed their creative talents and written a variety of puzzles for YOU to solve. For those of you who aren't familiar with what a puzzle hunt is, you can Google various FAQs online (one such page is
here). Essentially, you will be given a collection of information and expected to come up with a final word (or small phrase) which is the solution to the puzzle. You typically aren't given much help... it is your objective to draw conclusions on how to decipher the information based on the way it is arranged, the title of the puzzle, any patterns you see emerging, and so forth. Each puzzle typically requires some "leap of logic" where you connect the information to the puzzle's central theme somehow. For an example puzzle (and solution),
go here. You can also look through the puzzle archives for the MUMS, CISRA, and SUMS hunts (Google searches can find them), but I'd wager the average difficulty of the puzzles in our hunt will be easier.
This hunt will take place involving
teams of TWO Eliters. If you are interested in participating, you might want to figure out who you're partnering with soon.
The current plan for the hunt is to release all the puzzles at once on a website (which Neo is designing, thanks to him!). Once a member of your team clicks on a puzzle for the first time, a timer will start for your team and that puzzle. Once you solve the puzzle, that puzzle-specific timer will stop. At the end of the hunt, we will award points to the fastest 3 teams to solve each puzzle (maybe more depending on how many teams we have enter). This way, you don't feel obligated to stay awake for a puzzle's release, and it's fairly timezone indifferent. Plus, if you're on a roll, you could solve all the puzzles in one go if you feel up for it. But don't start your timer if you're planning on sleeping right away...
Not everyone has a keen mind for this type of thing, and that's fine. This is meant to be a fun hunt, and we want to make sure everyone is having fun. We would still like you to participate. Each puzzle will also have a series of hints which will be unveiled as your specific timer passes certain marked times (for example, 6 hours after you first open it, you might get your first hint). This should help keep people interested in the puzzle, and not just staring blankly at the page without any clue of what to do.
I am currently hoping to have 10 puzzles in our modest little hunt. I am going to be the puzzle master (that is, not competing), as I am compiling all the puzzles from the different sources, helping them test-solve it and providing my feedback. These 10 puzzles will range in difficulty from fairly easy to pretty difficult, and there should be a good variety of types of puzzles. Granted, since this is our first hunt, there are bound to be some hiccups and our puzzles may not be of the best quality, but we're going to try our best and see how it goes! Since the current plan is to release all the puzzles up front, there is no "scheduled time" for this hunt, though I suspect no team will solve all puzzles until a few days in. You can work on the puzzles mostly at your leisure, and just start the timer for your next puzzle when you're ready. I may put a hard cap on the hunt at around 8 days or so.
I know there is a fair amount of interest from (obviously) the Team Elite members about this, but I hope some of you who haven't gotten on board before will try your hand at it. It can be very rewarding to break through on a puzzle that has kept you stuck, and the hint system will ensure that you will often have new ideas to try out. Working in teams of two will always give you someone to bounce ideas between, since it is pretty hard to solve a puzzle all by yourself. Unfortunately, I suspect we won't have enough interest in the hunt to make the teams larger than two, but I think we're designing our puzzles to match that number. These puzzles won't need a crack team of 10 people to solve them, like some of the other hunts the Elite has participated in.
This topic will be used for general discussion about the hunt, and any announcements I have to make. If I must say, we have some neat puzzles planned, so I hope everything goes well!
