Weakest Carouselink (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)
| Weakest Carouselink | |
|---|---|
| MIT Mystery Hunt 2020 | |
| Big Top Carnival | |
| Author(s) | Ian Tullis, Yar Woo |
| Answer | Click to revealPINK SLIP |
| Statistics | |
| No. solves | 26 |
| No. total guesses | 87 |
| Links | |
| Puzzle | Link |
| Solution | Link |
You can become a contestant in the Big Top's interactive game show, The Weakest Carouselink! Enter the solution phrase CHOOSE ME to request a reservation for the next show.
Weakest Carouselink is an interaction puzzle from the Big Top Carnival round of the 2020 MIT Mystery Hunt.
Solve Path[edit | edit source]
Puzzle Elements[edit | edit source]
Interaction - The puzzle required sending two players to an interaction with HQ. The interaction involved playing in a Weakest Link-style quiz show with players from other teams. Solvers received the questions at the end of the interaction, and were told that remembering the answers would be useful.
Identical Substrings - Every word has a substring at the end that also forms the beginning substring of another word, and vice versa. The length of this substring is always at least two.
Chains - Solvers were told that the questions were given in no particular order. The real order, determined by the aforementioned identical substrings, form chains, one each of lengths 2-8. An example chain links cleopaTRA to TRAUMA to UMAMI to MIraCLE and back to CLEopatra.
Odd-One-Out - Exactly one "link" in each chain is "weaker" (involves a shorter substring) than the others. In the previous example, this is MI (length 2, where every other link is length 3). Extracting this link...
Final Clue Phrase - ...results in the phrase COLORFUL DISMISSAL. In conjunction with the enumeration of (4 4) given with the questions, this clues the answer.
