Sixth Post!
Nov. 5th, 2022 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hoisinsauce posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
secretfanspace"The thing about illegally breeding fire-breathing possums is that you gotta keep a bucket of water handy."
*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*
(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)
Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
*Those fools! Fire-breathing possums are greasy; water will only feed the flames! Oh, if only I could tell them of my empire...*
(Context: https://secretfanspace.dreamwidth.org/1839.html?thread=2678831#cmt2678831)
Talk fandom! Making things! Reading, writing, drawing, whatever! Miscellaneous life chatter! Meme's happy to see you again!
(start a comment thread by replying to this post)
Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt
Date: 2023-01-11 06:55 am (UTC)Theme this year is the 'Museum of Interesting Things.' My team is lacking in manpower this year, so let's hope we can get somewhere satisfying!
Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt
Date: 2023-01-11 09:29 am (UTC)Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt - Wrap-up
Date: 2023-01-23 08:57 am (UTC)Public access for this year's MIT Mystery Hunt is finally up, although I'm having some issues accessing some of the later rounds. As usual, this write-up will include spoilers for both the story and metapuzzles.
This year's Mystery Hunt begins with an announcement: as is trendy these days, the entire puzzle-writing team has been replaced by a puzzle-writing API named MATE. We are cordially invited to the Museum of Interesting Things, MATE's inaugural hunt.
The first few rounds are standard. We started in the museum's atrium, slowly progressing those the themed halls - science, natural history, art, and world history - before we notice two problems. First, there are no more puzzles. Second, the website is taking longer and longer to load - and in fact, we keep getting stuck on the loading animation (a jigsaw). Turns out this is a puzzle itself, and submitting the answer reveals the Puzzle Factory, where MATE is hard at work trying to create the rest of the hunt before we catch up to it. (Things didn't exactly happen like this in real life, of course. We didn't actually notice the lag until it was strongly hinted to us in an email because the past few hunts we've done have all had server issues.)
https://puzzlefactory.place/
We confront MATE. Where are the puzzles that were promised? Why are we here? Why is this AI making puzzles instead of making NFTs or taking over the world? After putting together the clues and going into a visual novel dialogue prompt we realize that - well, making puzzles is hard. MATE is just one AI who isn't up to the task.
This is about where my team wrapped out. We're a pretty small team, so getting to this first plot milestone was enough for us - and besides, it was the middle of the night for us. It was actually pretty funny, since the visual novel section was meant to be done with your whole team (everyone got to vote on which dialogue option to choose), but only two of us were awake at that point.
Had we gotten to this milestone earlier, we would've had an in-person interaction from Puzzle HQ where the puzzle hunt team came to yell at us for illegally snooping around their puzzle factory and messing up the hunt. After putting together some of the clues left behind in the puzzle hunt, we would find the discarded prototype AIs, fix the bugs in them, and gather them together to give MATE the help it needed and rebuild the hunt from scratch.
Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt - Wrap-up
Date: 2023-01-23 09:16 am (UTC)I didn't attend in person because
I procrastinated on buying plane ticketsI got sick, but my teammates who did seem to have had a fun time. There were a couple of fun physical-only puzzles they got to do, including literal underwater basket-weaving.Despite all that, I did enjoy a lot of puzzles in this hunt, though! The most fun one was probably Collage, which is unfortunately not supported in public access. It was basically a giant shared interactive word association grid where you and your team had to guess 90% of the web to get the answer. Pretty light on the actual brainwork, but heavy on fun teamwork.
A few puzzles I'd recommend:
Cute Cats & H2No - two relatively simple puzzles that don't require a lot of work.
Restoration - a pretty straight-forward identification puzzle. If you like DIY electronics, you'll probably enjoy this puzzle a lot more than I did!
Direct Translation - if you like the game Tunic, you'll really like this puzzle.
Catenaverbozoa & Word Press - these are quite a bit of work to get through, but they were fun word puzzles.
Re: Puzzles - MIT Mystery Hunt - Wrap-up
Date: 2023-01-23 04:59 pm (UTC)