FOCUS!! (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)
| FOCUS!! | |
|---|---|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 | |
| Creative Pictures Studios | |
| Author(s) | Chris Harris |
| Answer | Click to reveal🎅 |
| Statistics | |
| No. solves | 15 |
| No. total guesses | 188 |
| Links | |
| Puzzle | Link |
| Solution | Link |
They say the cinematographer had an eye for detail. Too bad he didn’t have two.
FOCUS!! is an Image-Heavy puzzle from the Creative Pictures Studios round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. It features several blurred photos of locations around North America.
Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]
Image-Heavy Presentation - The puzzle is a bunch of images...
Location, Location, Location - ...or rather, a bunch of StreetView locations around North America, which must be located. Unfortunately, most of them are blurred to a point where it's hard to read the text on the signage.
Hint in Flavortext - They say the cinematographer had an eye for detail. Too bad he didn’t have two.
Knowledge Required (Math, Geometry) - Plotting every location on the map reveals that the blurred points form the shape of an ellipse. Meanwhile, the one image that is actually in focus (fittingly enough, an eye clinic) is not on this ellipse; rather, it's one of the foci. Knowing that the sum of the distances between any point on the ellipse and the two foci should be constant, one can find the other focus, where the answer is.
