Weakest Carouselink (MIT Mystery Hunt 2020)

Weakest Carouselink
MIT Mystery Hunt 2020
Big Top Carnival
Author(s)Ian Tullis, Yar Woo
AnswerClick to revealPINK SLIP
Statistics
No. solves26
No. total guesses87
Links
PuzzleLink
SolutionLink


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.