MIT Mystery Hunt: Doctor of Thinkology

[asterroc]

"Doctor of Thinkology" (MIT Mystery Hunt 2010) had a bunch of questions about bizarre things, often things that didn't -couldn't- even exist. In each one, there was a single misspelling.

In my six years of participating in the MIT Mystery Hunt, this is the first time that I've worked on a puzzle from start (unlocking) to finish (correct solution submission), and I am very proud of my work. It also exhibited excellent layering of the puzzle, which T$ helped me to achieve on "Pining for the Fjords" (GUTLove 2010 practice puzzle) when he rewrote it for me.


Now, I don't really like the BBC fake informational series "Look Around You". I've just never found its humor funny, and at times I feel it's downright grating. Therefore when I discovered that this puzzle was about that (through doing Google searches on the strange terms in the questions), I immediately yelled out to my team "okay, who's a fan of 'Look Around You'?" NOBODY replied. I think two people other than myself had even heard of it. This was at around 10 or 11pm on Friday. From then until we left at 1am I was working on the puzzle solo, watching slowly downloading YouTube videos from a comedy series that I didn't like, and scouring the internet for non-existent transcripts of the episodes. Let me give you a hint: THERE AREN'T ANY. I also listed the incorrect letter in each question, the correct letter, the letters around it, and the word it was in (the flavortext clued "surroundings" to me).

The next morning I finally managed to "phone a friend" and get ahold of "Foxtrot" (a.k.a. JStP) who had introduced me to the series but isn't on the GUTLove team anymore after discovering he wasn't too good at it, and didn't enjoy it either. (tacotortoise told me our first year that putting out a general call for help on the intertubes isn't allowed, but asking a particular individual is, and I haven't seen anything to the contrary though I don't like doing it.) I fed "Foxtrot" ONLY the questions so he wouldn't get distracted by the whole puzzle and instead focus on the grunt work stage of it. With his help, BL, DM, and I quickly ground through finding the episode names and the answers to the questions.

Then we stared at our spreadsheet for a while. I think it was BL who started reading down the column of incorrect letters to discover the phrase "JUST IGNORE TYPOS FOR FOW". Yes, "FOW". We were 110% convinced the "F" was another clue we should ignore the typos, and started looking at the answers to the questions, which seemed so vague (do we use just one word? a combination of words?) that we went back to the JUST IGNORE TYPOS FOR FOW and checked it ten bazillion times. Then Foxtrot realized where we went wrong with the F ("maFipulated" is the word they used in the episode, it's actually "minuNes" that was the typo). And we stared at it some more.

The phrase

JUST IGNORE TYPOS FOR NOW

is what I mean by layering within a puzzle: you try one approach, and it not only tells you that you're doing it wrong, but sometimes it even gives you a hint as to what you should try next. While it didn't explicitly tell us what to do here, clearly we had to do something with the episodes or answers. After trying another billion things (ROT 13, index into episode names by the alphabet number of the wrong letter, shift the right letter by the number of digits in the episode name...) I started writing down the keywords from the questions' answers on a piece of paper. Pyramid, Understand one another, an ordinary Tissue... PUT...

By this time DM had gone on to another puzzle, and this just looked like some word was trying to come out. I kept getting the wrong keywords (what letter do you use for "two and a half million"? or "19"?), but BL helped me force through it, and finally we got

PUT INTO ORDER OF APPEARANCE

which at this point we (correctly) assumed referred to ordering the correct (non-misspelled) letters in the order that that question appeared in the series.

At which point I "phoned" Foxtrot once again. As he skimmed through the episodes on YouTube, BL and I sorted on episode number, discovered there were three from each episode (which should've clued us earlier that something was going on with the episodes), and tried to jumble each set of 3 letters to spell something coherent. We all got to the same answer at the same time:

TORONTO'S CHEMICAL SYMBOL IS

And what do you know, the "Look Around You" series had a fake periodic table of the elements, one of the elements was Toronto, its symbol was To, and the correct final answer for the puzzle was

TO

Yeah, all that work for a 2-letter answer.


Like I said, this was the first puzzle that I was involved with from start to finish. It's really beautiful and elegant to see the whole thing work like this, how each small part fits neatly together to come to the end. For those of you not familiar with the Hunt, as you read over the summary above, you may have noticed that there were something like 4 major steps, each taking a leap of logic/faith. Usually when I'm involved with a puzzle I do one step only, then I get stuck, put it down, and when it grabs someone else's eye I summarize what I did for them and they move on from there. When they solve that step, they put it down, summarize for the next person, and for the previous person. Repeat until final solution. As a result, I only ever fully understand a small part of any puzzle that I touched. Understanding every last step in full excruciating detail is a new pleasure for me, and I'm quite proud of the work that I (and Foxtrot, BL, and DM) did on this puzzle. :)

The puzzles are not back up yet, I'll link to this one when it does go up. And right after I posted this I saw that the puzzles are in fact back up, so I linked this one above and here.

Comments

[freakylynx.livejournal.com]

Happy Birthday :)