MIT Mystery Hunt Wrap-Up Part 4

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.

(SPOILER ALERT: THESE POSTS CONTAIN DETAILS OF PUZZLES FROM THE HUNT INCLUDING HOOKS AND ANSWERS).

The next round was the Mock Turtle round. We got through this without too much trouble, although completing all the puzzles was quite a challenge. Every year, there’s some sort of “scavenger hunt” where you have to find a bunch of odd items, with bigger teams having to bring more items. One thing on the list was someone who could solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute, which I can do. Unfortunately, my good cube (oiled and all) was at home, so I solicited the team for one. As it turns out, one of our team members still had the cubes she bought for us last year during the Rubik’s cube meta round. It turned so poorly that there was no way I would break a minute, and I couldn’t easily find the type of spray that makes these turn really well. (I would get my chance for a good Rubik’s puzzle later, though).

One interesting puzzle here was Safer Sephiroth, a Final Fantasy themed puzzle. The funny thing about this was that we were in the middle of a team meeting and it was mentioned that that phrase was related to the Book of Numbers. The meta-puzzle, as it turned out, had a bunch of fill-in-the-blank clues where the answers were all two letters off from a character in Alice in Wonderland or Through the Looking Glass. So someone in the room said, “Would TORAH work as an answer?” We called it in and it worked!

The one puzzle I worked on really late in the hunt was Please Remain Seated. This was the perfect example of experts on certain things teaming up to solve a puzzle. Someone good at roller coasters figured out what the theme parks and coasters were. Then we noticed the videos on the right were all knots in the mathematical sense. We guessed that the crossing number would be the most likely invariant they’d use as an index. Our team has many, many mathematicians, and there happened to be a knot theorist in there. Our final solution was a mixture of front solving and backsolving because we knew which trivia question it went with, so once we had the first half of the answer, we guessed the last.

Another extremely clever round was The White Queen. The entire round was backward! They gave you the meta-puzzle answer and a handful of puzzle answers, then you had to backsolve to get other answers, and from those, you had to solve the puzzles backward to get the title! For the meta, there was a chessboard with red and pink squares. Only pinks were filled in with the last names of Red Sox players. We quickly guessed the rest of the pinks, but had none of the reds. We must’ve called in 50 wrong answers going through the White Sox and other teams. In the end, it turned out to be Beatles Songs, so we were way off.

The only one I worked on here was Cronin, which was really cool. There’s an annoying cat who flies through space with stars in the background. Reading the source, it’s reading from a 3MB file of seemingly random hex digits. Someone on our team discovered it was MD5 hashes. They built up words one letter at a time, for a sentence from Alice in Wonderland, starting with the empty string, then there was a really long string of hex at the end. You repeat that with SHA1 and get another quote and another string. You repeat that with SHA3 and get the final answer. We got this one done at about 1 AM on Saturday and I was so tired at this point.

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5. Part 6.