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

[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.