Hunt 2009: Spaceship

[asterroc]

I'm going to start chronicling some of what went on at the Hunt. Rather than having a single absurdly long post, or else lose steam and never post it (like happened last year), I've decided to do it in installments. This one is about the spaceship competition, and a bit of team history.

Spaceship Competition

There were two general categories of spaceships that people entered: modified from commercially available parts that already do what you need, and built from scratch with lots of computer stuff. For example, the entry with RV wheels attached to Lego Mindstorm motors controlled by an XO (One Laptop Per Child), which also controls more Lego Mindstorms that raise a Maglight to push the button overheat, I consider this to be "built from scratch." On the other hand, our use of things like a Roomba Squishy base (obstacle course - 10 pts), with detachable components including a Nerf gun (projectile - 10pts), rollerblade wheel on a coat hanger (button pushing - 5 pts), Nerf-guided laser (laser - 10 pts), and duct-tape covered plastic cup on a string (rescue mission - 10 pts), puts our entry firmly into the commercially available category.


Example of a spaceship built "from scratch"


Our "prefab" ship, click on image for notations of what each part was for if you couldn't figure out from the description above.

People who did this event were myself, Aleks, and Laura. While there we ran into the Halibutters best_ken_ever and two girls I didn't know.


Team History

For those of you following along at home, our team has a history with the Haliburtons. For the 2005 (?) Hunt, the team Lake Effect Snow was formed by tacotortoise and myself, and numbered something like 20 people (I'm sure someone will correct me). For the next two years, lots of fun was had, but also lots of frustration, as there were two conflicting goals within the team. One portion wanted to work towards the goal of winning the Hunt eventually, and some of the ideas they had to reach this goal were to recruit more puzzlers and more strong puzzlers, to solve puzzles with tactical goals (e.g.., once you get some fraction of the puzzles in the round, concentrate on the meta and not the missing puzzles), to have people working on puzzles 'round the clock, and to designate people to take on certain tasks such as communications and cleanup. Another portion wanted to focus on having fun, and felt that the best path to this goal was to exclude puzzlers of certain personality types, individual wiki use, large amounts of downtime for sleep, spending time for fun rather than for what is useful, and designing snazzy shirts. In addition, there were debates within the team about who should be captain - we tried going with consensus, but someone is needed for communication with the team running the Hunt, and there were issues about people not wanting to run a team filled with people who weren't aligned with their own preference for how the team should work.

This conflict in goals and approach led to a split last year (2008 Hunt), those people wishing to focus on fun becoming Grand Unified Theory of Love (with T$ as captain), and those wishing to focus on winning becoming Just for the Halibut (I think with seekingferret as captain). The history of the two teams means that I at least am always interested in how the other team is doing, and take note when I see them at events.




So back to the spaceship, three of the Halibuttons were at the spaceship competition, and I of course have to make some friendly jibes at them. Apparently seekingferret had entirely built their spaceship (commercially available style) in NY, and then unfortunately failed to bring the remote control, which necessitated rebuilding it on a new base. Unfortunately this was on the Sabbath, so seekingferret was unable to participate in the rebuilding himself... I saw best_ken_ever doing a lot of retooling and the two college girls doing a lot of watching. Back at GUT♥ HQ there were wisecracks about "keeping their girls down" as opposed to how our spaceship was built by all girls. :-P

Comments

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a lot of fun....

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Oh it definitely is! But also very insane and draining. :-P Unfortunately it's always right before I have to return for the Spring semester, so now I need to panic that I'm not ready for the Spring!

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

So what exactly is it?
You build a space ship and run obstacle courses with it? Judged on your ship in general?

[gemini6ice.livejournal.com]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mit_mystery_hunt

The spaceship task was specific to this year's hunt and was only one small part.

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

Thanks! That helped clear up my confusion.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

The spaceship was one particular puzzle of around 100 (though we probably only saw 75 or so of them). Here's an entry I wrote a few years ago describing the MIT Mystery Hunt when our old team (Lake Effect Snow) was trying to recruit additional members. (Interestingly, you can already tell from that post how LES was having internal friction about the team's goals.) I've also got a tag with more Hunt entries.

[spazzy444.livejournal.com]

That is so cool! I wish we had something like that around here. Sounds like it is absolutely insane.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

You may, there are various puzzle competitions nationwide, but I don't know of them myself.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

For the spaceship competition specifically, you had to build a "spaceship" that could meet various criteria. How well you met those criteria resulted in points, and you needed to earn a certain number of points. Full details are here, but in short it had to be able to navigate remotely, shoot something a certain distance, point a laser at something, go into a tunnel and push a button, and pick up objects below it. To pass, you only had to do 3 of them kinda well, or two perfectly, or all of them half-assed.

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

Meh, it was just because seekingferret had originally recruited the three of us to learn how to control the craft, once he learned that he was going to be unavailable for the actual running of the spaceship event. Since I had some (small amount of) experience working on the spaceship beforehand and controlling it remotely in general, I was sort of de-facto running the show. In retrospect, I could've let the other team members work on it. My main reason not to was ultimately that I wanted to get back to puzzling, but I also didn't want to let this puzzle go, as we (particularly seekingferret spent a lot of time working on the spaceship event, and I didn't want to let it go to waste in case they couldn't finish. Perhaps another reason was because they were both first-time hunters and may not've been sure what to do if we couldn't compile the necessary 30 points.

...these thoughts are perhaps incoherent and maybe I should expand later. Gah. Going to sleep a long time on the bus home.

Anyway, it was nice to see you - perhaps Karthik mentioned that Tortoise and I stopped by briefly during the middle of the night as we were submitting one of our Inner Metas. The poor guy was there all by himself.

Anyway, our team had tons of fun solving this year, and I hope yours did, too (:

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, we're short on overnighters, so we basically pressed Karthik semi-willingly into staffing our HQ just so that there'd be someone watching our equipment. There were a few other small things that we want to improve next year, but overall we did have fun.

How many puzzles did y'all solve? I think we got 32, which is more than twice last year! :-P

Edit: To clarify, it was my impression from Karthik's tone that he was a bit reluctant to be the only overnighter, but T$ talked with him more extensively and he was repeatedly given the opportunity to sleep and he chose not to do so. It's likely that his caffeine/sleep deprivation fogged speech was slurred so I read something different into it than he intended. :-P

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

At last count, we recorded 52 solves, counting individual pieces of the four-part Orbital puzzles as their own solve, (so, four each for the two of those) but not counting the four events.

Our first four (Inner) metas came in relatively quick succession on Saturday late-night after I finished the Duck Konundrum (I eventually elicited some needed help from a team member or two...that was a monster.) The only one we didn't get was The ATM, as we were unable to complete Micronauts or that stupid crossword one.

We also solved the first minimeta of the Lazyr Zone and we were still raring on the Doctor Who puzzles as well as a few others as the coin was found. Ah well. Still, all in all, a lot of fun. I am most proud of our system of remote-interaction this year; we expanded our Drupal site and used GoogleDocs organized by round extensively in order to collaborate effectively. It really helped the remotes be an effective "fin", so to speak, of the Halibut.


Grah, more later. Gotta get some sleep on this bus.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

How many people were on your team? I think we had around 30 and only a couple remotes (the usually highly productive Phoenix extension had some other commitment this weekend).

Unfortunately I don't think we solved any metas. :( In the wrap-up video, I noticed the orrery (on the Orbital page) had arrows allowing them to step forward or backwards in time. Is that what you saw too? Our team saw only an animated .png, and I'm wondering if we were supposed to see the arrows but didn't b/c we were all Macs. (Out of some 20-30 computers, I think there were less than 5 PCs.)

Just about everyone on our team looked at Micronauts and were entirely stumped - when I say "entirely," I mean we didn't even think of looking for related words. The person sitting next to me emailed in for hints, and I got drawn into listening and speculating. The person on the other end of the line led us to look at related words, and to think about very small things. A couple of us brainstormed various pairs, including "lucky charm", and I started rattling off particle physics things, when I stumbled on "quark". I am NOT a particle physicist (never taken a single class that mentioned anything smaller than an electron other than neutrinos), so I had to look up the flavors of quarks, I have to admit.

[best-ken-ever.livejournal.com]

We had about 30 people show up at HQ throughout the weekend, and about 20 or so from noon-to-9pm peak times. Sometimes as few as five in the morning hours. A few of us took naps here and there in the secondary room. We had about eight remotes who seriously contributed to puzzle-solving in some ways or other. Whole puzzles were theirs, and some major a-ha moments were had by them.

Ultimately, I thought we had a far lower percentage of "have everything but the extraction" this year, compared to last year, though they were much more difficult in some instances than I'm used to. We can go over puzzles more sometime soon, maybe? I'd enjoy seeing what insights we shared and which ones we had which were unique.

As for Orbital, we didn't have those arrows. I think one needed to have more puzzles solved in it. We had...maybe two? I forget.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

I feel like I touched far fewer puzzles this year than last, and like our wiki use wasn't quite as good as last year's. So I'm glad to go over what I've got w/ you (both in my head and on the wiki), but I feel a bit useless in the end - to be entirely honest, I think most of it is just that I burned out faster than usual, and I think that's due to the stressful week I had last week, prepping my new online course.

[jennekirby.livejournal.com]

Man, I'm learning so much about our team by reading this post. :)

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Hah! Awesome.

[tacotortoise.livejournal.com]

For Orbital Nexus, you got the orrery if you partly solved at least four moon puzzles, including at least one solved in multiple quarters (not sure if you needed at least 2 quarters or all 4 there). As Ken said, we stalled out at 2 moons in the Nexus. Another effect of this is that there were 2 moons that we didn't unlock, and I'm pretty sure Cross-Something-or-Others (Blue Moon) would have fallen if I had seen it (and had a few hours to pound out the individual puzzles). But that still wouldn't have been enough to unlock the orrery. Also, "orrery" is a great word.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

*nods* I had looked at the solution to Orbital Nexus since posting that comment above, and even w/o the tool to step through the orrery, and without any puzzles solved in that round, I was still making headway on that meta. :-P *grr* Oh well.

[tacotortoise.livejournal.com]

I would also like to point out that when we passed by for our next inner meta a couple of hours later, Karthik was actually ASLEEP. Given the awake-off you and Karthik had in 2007, I was amusedly shocked to see this.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

Karthik had apparently had insomnia problems for a few days before the Hunt, so that gave him a handicap. :-P

[rhysara.livejournal.com]

I actually meant to comment on this post awhile ago (but was reading it on my phone at the time). I really loved the short team history as as a relative newcomer to the hunt I don't really know very much about the history behind the various teams and traditions and it was nice to learn more. I wish I knew as much about some of the other teams.

[zandperl.livejournal.com]

tacotortoise who founded LES with me had previously been on a few teams, so he often knows what's going on with them. He's still with Just for the Halibut, and I'm in touch w/ him and a few of their leaders, so they always catch me up on the gossip that they've heard about the other teams.

Sometimes I wish there was more opportunity to get to know people on other teams - even when we're in the same place at the same time, we're so wrapped up with our own team - but that's not truly the point of the Hunt. I doubt our team will ever run the Hunt, but if we did maybe I'd make a face-to-face event that required more cooperation w/ other team's reps.

[rhysara.livejournal.com]

I doubt our team will ever run the Hunt, but if we did maybe I'd make a face-to-face event that required more cooperation w/ other team's reps.

Actually I think that that is a great idea. I have a good friend who plays a lot of the Bay Area Games and he's always said that if he ever runs a game he's going to do something that temporarily removes a member from their actual team and forms a new team with those people who then have to learn to work together to accomplish something. Should we (heaven forbid) ever win a hunt, I would probably try to encorporate something along those lines.

Speaking of which. One of our stated team goals is "not to win", the other is to "refrain from coming in last". We strive for mediocrity.