MIT Mystery Hunt 2020/The Scottish Display

The Scottish Display
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020
The Grand Castle
The puzzle's icon, a theatre stage situated outside to represent the connection to Macbeth.
Author(s)	Jan Chong, Ian Tullis (original concept)
Links
Puzzle	Link
Solution	Link

The Scottish Display is a word-based puzzle from the Grand Castle round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt. It features multiple lines of trigrams, each colored differently. This puzzle also does not contain any flavortext whatsoever.

Solve Path

Ignoring the title at first, the only thing solvers are presented with is a selection of trigrams and the occasional bigram/single letter, grouped into 28 sets of up to 14 alphabetically-sorted fragments. These sets are colored in one of 16 distinct ways, with some colors repeating.

As is the case with most trigram-based puzzles, the first step is the rearrange each set into a sentence that makes sense. Two such results are "LET NOT LIG HTS EEM YBL ACK AND DEE PDE SIR ESI" and "IDR EAM TLA STN IGH TOF THE THR EEW EIR DPS IST ERS". As solvers put these together, they will hopefully notice two things. First, that all of the sentences are direct quotes from Macbeth, a play by William Shakespeare that is often referred to as "The Scottish Play" to avoid saying its (reportedly) cursed name. Second, each of the completed rearrangements has a single extra letter inserted into them (The letter I at the end of the first example, and the letter P in the second between "weird" and "sisters").

Upon further investigation, solvers may also notice that each of the quotes is from a different one of the 28 scenes of Macbeth, thereby providing an ordering for the extra letters. Those letters spell out the phrase "APPLY APPROPRIATE COLORCHECKER". With a bit of a research, solvers should discover that ColorChecker's Color Rendition Chart was originally known as the Macbeth ColorChecker, and all of the colors used in the puzzle are also present in it.

Armed with this information, solvers can then assign a letter of the alphabet (A-X) to each of the colors in the ColorChecker in reading order, and use it as a way to extract a new single letter from each of the trigram sets (retaining the ordering determined by the Shakespeare lines). Doing so, the phrase "NAME OF SW PAINT SIX TWO THREE FOUR" will be extracted.

Final Answer: Click to revealUNCERTAIN GRAY.

Puzzle Elements

Alphanumeric Substitution Cipher - Extraction of this puzzle utilizes the MacBeth Color Checker numbers 1-24.

Color Identification - While exact hex codes may not be essential to solving the puzzle, being able to match colors from the puzzle text to those on the ColorChecker is key. Final Clue Phrase - "NAME OF SW PAINT SIX TWO THREE FOUR"

Hint In Title - While not immediately obvious, the reference to "The Scottish Play" is confirmation that turning the trigram strings into Macbeth quotes is a good idea.

Shakespeare - The puzzle's main AHA moment derives from the play, Macbeth.

Trigram Hell - Practically the entire puzzle! Until solvers make the connection to the ColorChecker, all there is to do is rearrange the trigrams.

Uninvited Guests - The first extraction involves taking extraneous letters that had been added to the quotes.