MIT Mystery Hunt 2013
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 | |
|---|---|
| Running Team | Manic Sages |
| Winning Team | the full text of Atlas Shrugged |
| Timeframe and Location | |
| Location | MIT (Cambridge, MA) |
| Links | |
| Hunt Link | Link |
| MIT Mystery Hunt Chronology | |
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 was the 33rd iteration of the MIT Mystery Hunt. It was run by Manic Sages, the winners of the 2012 Mystery Hunt. The hunt started with a presentation by Enigma Valley Investment & Loan, where teams learned that the running team had mortgaged the coin. The presentation is infiltrated by Alyssa P. Hacker (a reference to a character in a renown MIT computer science textbook and course, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming), suggesting that the real objective of the hunt is to pull off a bank heist and steal the coin. In order to pull off the heist, teams needed to recruit six members. Upon recruiting each member (that is, solving the round), teams get an interaction where they get to do a practice version of an obstacle, that gets used again in the final runaround.
The hunt holds the record for being the longest hunt in history, with the coin being found over 75 hours after the hunt started by a team whose name was the full text of Atlas Shrugged.[1]
TO DO
List of Rounds[edit | edit source]
| Round Title | Number of Feeder Puzzles | Number of Metapuzzles |
|---|---|---|
| Corporate Intranet | 6 | 1 |
| Danny Ocean | 17 | 1 |
| Richard Feynman | 25 | 1 |
| Agent 99 | 25 | 4 |
| Indiana Jones | 24 | 4 |
| Marty Bishop | 16 | 4 |
| Erno Rubik | 20 | 7 |
| Events | 6 | 0 |
| Final Runaround | 6 | 0 |
Mentions in Other Media[edit | edit source]
- The Tech - Manic Sages prepare 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt puzzles
- The Tech - A Hunt of Epic Proportions
- Wired - 2013: The Year the Mystery Hunt Broke
- Research paper by Klára Churá and Tanya Khovanova - Fractal Word Search: How Deep to Delve
Reviews and Write Ups[edit | edit source]
From Manic Sages[edit | edit source]
- Derek Kisman - How was the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle "In the Details" created?
- littlegreenriver - Mystery Hunt Post-Mortem: The Hunt We Wanted and the Hunt We Had - Three Puzzles - 10 bits of advice for running a Mystery Hunt art team
- Tanya Khovanova - Apologies - Open Secrets - Random Walk - Portals - Something in Common - In the Details - The Most Difficult Hunt Puzzle: 50/50 - Turnary Reasoning - Cambridge Waldo - Integers and Sequences
- Tanya Khovanova - 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt
Others[edit | edit source]
- 530nm330hz - My Mystery Hunt writeup - A thought about "unlocking mechanisms"
- Anand Sarwate - On entitlement and the Mystery Hunt
- canadianpuzzler - First 2013 Mystery Hunt thoughts
- cananian - Puzzles I worked on (MIT Mystery Hunt 2013) - The Gashly-Hunt Tinies
- chris - The world's puzzle hunt
- claviscryptica - My First MIT Mystery Hunt - Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Wrap-up
- devjoe - 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt: Too Big to Solve (Opening, Intro round, and first two main rounds) - Main round 3 - Main round 4 - Main round 5 - Main round 6 (the last round!)
- dr_whom - The year the Hunt ate Cleveland - The Mystery Hunt is made out of puzzles
- dumble - Thank you, Sages!
- Eric Berlin - I Prefer Puzzles
- intotheweeds - MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 (a.k.a. The Misery Hunt)
- jarsyl - MIT Mystery Hunt reaction - Round 0 - Danny Ocean Round - Feynman Round - Get Smart Round
- leech - Changing how we think about the end of hunt
- ludiberkeley - Tales from the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt - "lol" - "A Set of Words" - "Digging Up Music" - "Mashup" - "Mergers"
- mako - Mystery Hunt 2013
- motris - Too Big to Solve?
- mystery_fish - The year that the Hunt won
- Neville Fogarty - Puzzle #28: Decline and Fall of the Puzzle Empire
- novalis - (no subject)
- Peter Sarrett - Mystery Hunt 2013
- puzzleology - MIT Mystery Hunt
- rhysara - (no subject) - (no subject)
- sniffnoy - Mystery Hunt roundup 2013
- snowspinner/Phil Sandifer - The Nature of "Hard" - MIT Mystery Hunt Wrap-up Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3 - Part 4 - Part 5
- tablesaw - Quick Mystery Hunt Rant
- temporary-obsession - “The First Aid Kit Is Not a Puzzle”: Mystery Hunt 2013 - More Mystery Hunt 2013: "Call in Maybe"
- The Longest Now - MYSTERY HUNTING, 2013: PULLING OFF AN EPIC COIN HEIST
- Tyler Hinman - Back to school - Fixing the Mystery Hunt
- zandperl - A (Scathing?) Review of the 2013 Hunt
Leaderboard[edit | edit source]
Data taken from the image provided in this link. Teams are ranked by number of solves by hunt end, as there was only one finishing team (who also solved the most puzzles)
| Rank | Team | Solves |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | bigjimmy | 148 |
| 2 | palindrome | 142 |
| 3 | death | 134 |
| 4 | luck | 132 |
| 5 | jarthur | 131 |
| 6 | leftout | 125 |
| 7 | Codex Zouche-Nuttall | 124 |
| 8 | IIF | 116 |
| 9 | uplate | 96 |
| 10 | Setec | 94 |
| 11 | waltkidney | 76 |
| 12 | readers | 75 |
| 13 | simhunt | 73 |
| 14 | plant | 72 |
| 15 | cservices | 65 |
- ↑ This is despite many measures taken during the hunt in order to reduce its length, by giving teams many free answers and only requiring five out of six metas to be solved.
