MIT Mystery Hunt is happening! by Alan Z. '23, MEng '24

Hello! I’m writing this very, very smol post to tell you that the MIT Mystery Hunt is starting, today, January 15th, at 12 PM EDT. MIT Mystery Hunt is a time-honored tradition, which you can learn more about in CJ’s enormous post,⁠01 notably, however, this is <a href="https://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/course-catalogs-history/">no longer CJ’s longest post</a>. why, CJ? why? where he talks about his experience as part of the winning team last year. Here’s an excerpt:

A puzzlehunt is a series of puzzles, but what exactly a puzzle is is kind of hard to define. It’s like a Sudoku or a crossword, but you have to figure out the rules in order to do it. Puzzles have some sort of answer, which is usually a word or a phrase, like “COLLAPSE” or “FILM REVIEW”.⁠ Solving a puzzle will unlock even more puzzles.

Puzzlehunts have special kinds of puzzles called metapuzzles, or simply metas. After solving several puzzles, you get a series of answers. A meta is a kind of puzzle that uses these answers in order to find a new answer.

A large puzzlehunt like the Mystery Hunt typically consists of several rounds, each with several metas, each combining the answers of several puzzles. Often, these metas are also combined to form an answer to a metametapuzzle, or a metameta. After a team solves the metameta, the Mystery Hunt then ends with a final puzzle called a runaround, which involves going around campus to find the location of a hidden coin.

I’m participating in hunt for the first time this year,⁠02 I am on the same team as Shuli! I will probably write more about this later. and, as a person who is very new to puzzles, I am both very scared and very excited. This year’s hunt is themed around a scientific conference called “Maturing Young Scientific Theories: Expanding Reality & You”, and therefore it will start (or kick off) with a keynote speaker, after which there will be many, many puzzles to do. The kickoff stream will go live at 11:40 AM,⁠03 for those of you who do FRC, this feels like an FRC kickoff to me…there is so much to be revealed. and, when the time comes, you can watch it right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZ2ihFvauSM.