Eric Berlin

If you follow the MIT Mystery Hunt at all, then you already know that this year’s event, which ended Monday afternoon, was the longest of the modern era, taking an exorbitant 73 hours from the release of the first round of puzzles to the moment when a team finally claimed victory by finding a coin hidden on campus. Somewhere around the 48th hour of the Hunt, one of my teammates, a smart and good-natured fellow named Arun, called the Hunt organizers to ask for a hint about a puzzle.

Arun had basically dedicated his life to a particular puzzle called “In The Details,” and the description of this puzzle should give you an idea about the kind of thing we see at the Mystery Hunt. “In the Details” was a “fractal word seek.” After solving what you could on the first level of the word seek, you were expected (through some cryptographic and/or mathematical operation that I never did fully comprehend) to expand the word seek out to the next level of the fractal, and continue searching for words there. And then again, and then again. The people working on this puzzle ultimately expanded the word seek to the 85th or 86th level before locating all of the words they were expected to find. But even after all that, Arun and the others still didn’t have an answer to the puzzle itself. Solvers generally come away from a hunt puzzle with a word or phrase, which they will then need to use later on. Despite all the work that had been put into it, “In The Details” steadfastly refused to give up that answer.

So Arun called and asked for a hint. It was clear at that point that the Hunt was running long. Previous Hunts had sometimes ended by now, but this time, no end was in sight. The puzzles were extremely hard, and the meta puzzles even more so. A hint at this point seemed like a perfectly reasonable request. But Arun was dismissed with a firmness that I found rather surprising.

When my team, Palindrome, ran the 2008 Hunt, we too discovered we had overshot on the difficulty. Our response was to begin hinting as rapidly as possible, answering questions about the puzzles in great detail if need be. Why on earth couldn’t we get even a small nudge on this impossible word search? The only teams Palindrome refused to give hints to, years ago, were those teams in contention for the victory.

…Oh. And that is how I figured out that we were the lead team in the Hunt, or close to it.

Perhaps you suppose I might have guessed this, but really, I had no idea. The Hunt this year consisted of six distinct rounds — and at that point, we had only completed two of them. I thought we might be doing reasonably well compared to other teams, but winning? Or close to winning? That was hard to imagine.

On the other hand, we had a very large team this year. Palindrome is an open team: Anybody can join it. This year it felt like everybody did. Not too long ago we struggled to reach 50 teammates. This year we came mighty close to 100. Established team members brought in colleagues and friends. The Hunt organizers post a list of “unattached hunters” — people who want to play but who don’t have a team — and each year I pick up a few new people from this list. This year’s bunch of unattached hunters was a bonanza. I lured in a fellow named Eric. (We are required, it seems, to recruit a new Eric each year — we now have a great many of them.) This particular Eric, it turned out, was connected to a whole gang of Microsoft and Google engineers, all of them looking for a team. This turned out to be quite a bumper crop of excellent puzzling brains.

Also grabbed from the unattached hunters list was a total puzzle hunt newbie, a lawyer (I think) from Denver named Jonathan. Except he didn’t join Palindrome for himself. He came to the Mystery Hunt with his son, Brandon, who is 11 years old. His father told me that Brandon was a puzzle nut who couldn’t wait to one day participate in the Mystery Hunt. The trip to Cambridge was Brandon’s Christmas present.

I was a little nervous for both Brandon and his father — the Mystery Hunt can be overwhelming and difficult even for people who believe they enjoy puzzles, and if the Hunt did not match Brandon’s expectations, it could have been a disappointing trip home for them. I needn’t have worried. Jonathan told me that his son had been through the Hunt archive and knew what to expect. It would have been fairer to say that Brandon had memorized the Hunt archive. He could speak of themes and specific puzzles with an astonishing fluency, and he fit in with the team like a veteran. He was always busy with a puzzle, attended a bunch of events, and was still bopping along with the rest of us in the wee hours of the morning.

So Palindrome became a large team just in time to take on a Hunt seemingly designed for large teams. Still, it was hard to believe we were doing more than, say, keeping pace with the top third of Hunt teams. The vibe in headquarters was not “We are clearly killing this!” but rather “Help! We are drowning in puzzles! Very hard puzzles!”

Because the puzzles were indeed very hard. I think I understand how this happens. Unconsciously or overtly, puzzlemakers get it into their heads that they are creating puzzles that will be presented at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology!!!, one of the three or four greatest collections of smarts on the planet. It’s intimidating to consider the audience for these puzzles, and it takes great discipline to keep oneself from reaching for the difficulty knob, giving it a little twist, and then another little twist, until before you know it, you’ve cranked the difficulty all the way up to 11. All the while saying, “I hope these people don’t knock this off too easily…”

The metapuzzles at this year’s Hunt were particularly deadly. One of the great joys for advanced puzzlers is the joy of solving a metapuzzle even though you have not yet acquired all the answers that feed into it. When a metapuzzle has nine separate parts, and you discover the solution with only five of those parts, you feel like a puzzling giant. (Or so I imagine, as I have personally never accomplished this. But it’s fun even to be standing next to somebody who has just done it.) For the most part, the metapuzzles at this year’s Hunt did not allow for this sort of solving. Some of them were excellent, but others were assembled not from five or nine or fifteen separate answers but from dozens of individual puzzles — and those metapuzzles were structured in such a way as to force you solve nearly everything before you could really make headway on the solution. (Anyway, we certainly didn’t get anywhere with them. If you broke through on, say, the Feynman meta with only half the answers for it, I would sure like to know how you did it.)

Palindrome’s motto, as it says right on out nametags, is “We Play For Fun.” We’re not particularly filled with competitve spirit, and we’re not a good team for bloodthirsty Vince Lombardi types. I wouldn’t mind winning one day, but it’s more important that everybody enjoy themselves. Nonetheless, when I announced that we were one of the top teams in the Hunt, a subtle shift in tone could be detected. We didn’t go crazy with it — we didn’t tear up our nametags in order to get rid of our core motto — but you could tell that people were itching to grab the victory that we now understood to be within reach.

But there was a long way to go. We still only had two of the six rounds completed. There were so many puzzles floating around that it was impossible to keep track of them all, much less solve them. The hour grew late. We had already been through two graveyard shifts, and many of us had slept hardly at all through the weekend. Were we now going to stay up all night Sunday night — a good twelve hours after the Hunt would have ended in a more conventional year — to try to win this thing?

Yes.

Teammates who had gone home came back in. Anya — a newcomer I had grabbed from the unattached hunter list but who had leapt into the weekend like she’d been on the team for a decade — brought homemade chocolate-chip cookies. (This was the Year of Cookies. I had rewarded graveyard shift solvers on Friday and Saturday with warm cookies from Insomnia Cookies. And another teammate, Ben, started us off with three giant containers of cookies, including something called Oreo Cheesecake Cookies. I don’t know if the Nobel Prize has a category for cookies, but if they did, Oreo Cheesecake Cookies would win.) Another teammate, Amy, brought the makings for waffles. A previously quiet young lady, Ange, transformed before our eyes: She whipped us into shape but good. She made extensive notes on what people were working on and what needed our attention, and she directed people like the world’s most efficient traffic cop. The Hunt organizers began allowing teams to buy puzzle answers at the rate of one per hour, and Ange kept time with the sternness of an SAT proctor. Rather brilliantly, she convinced the Hunt organizers that if we performed an act of amusing ritual humiliation, we would get an additional answer. To that end, we wrote and performed a pastiche of “Call Me, Maybe” (called “Solve Me, Maybe”).

And we solved puzzles. Lord, did we solve puzzles. I have been on Palindrome for close to two decades and I have never seen a burst of overnight productivity like what we accomplished this year, on Monday from midnight to five a.m. One by one, the puzzles fell, and then the metapuzzles. As the sun came up, we had only three puzzles left — the final puzzle for each of three remaining rounds.

We got stuck on all three of them.

The hours passed, and still there was no winner. The Hunt organizers announced that you no longer had to solve all six rounds — five would do. So now we only had to solve two of the three final puzzles. And we couldn’t do it.

- We had to transform a list of dates into an answer via a puzzle based in part on hieroglyphics. Some of the people working on this are professional puzzle creators; one of them had been the key figure in solving practically every metapuzzle all weekend long. We couldn’t do it. A thousand different approaches got us nowhere.

- We had to solve a puzzle involving a Rubik’s Cube — a puzzle so complicated I’m not even sure how to explain it to you. The people working on this included a physics professor from Harvard and a guy who, earlier that evening, had solved the Rubik’s Cube in about a minute, while simultaneously singing Tom Lehrer’s “The Elements.” We couldn’t do it. This team never really got stuck, per se, but their advancement through the puzzle was inch by painful inch.

- We had to assemble an Enigma machine from a cardboard tube and some pre-printed strips of paper. Some of the people we had working on this are employed by the National Security Agency. We couldn’t do it. Maybe we were overlooking something fundamental, after a hundred hours of brain-fry. I don’t know. But we couldn’t do it.

Soon the sun was in the sky again. People had planned for the Hunt to be over long before now — they needed to check out of their hotels, and get to the airport or to the train station. We had to clean our headquarters and convert the rooms back into classrooms. A large fraction of the team was sitting around waiting, hoping for a breakthrough that might get us back on track… a breakthrough that was looking less and less likely. Continuing the Hunt started to seem nuts — Captain Ahab territory. Finally, and painfully, I waved the white flag. If people wanted to continue solving, that was fine, but officially, we were done.

We spent an hour cleaning up. Somewhere along the way, the Rubik’s Cube solvers reached a solution. As I left to make my train, a small group of teammates decided to take on the one last puzzle we needed to solve before reaching the Hunt’s endgame. Amtrak was just pulling out of the station when I recieved the message: “We’re on the runaround!” Palindrome had reached the final stage of the Hunt after all. A few hours later, by the time I got home, I learned that we had completed the Hunt — a little over sixty minutes after the first-place team.

On the one hand, it’s hard not to ache at how close we came to victory. Our fingertips had brushed the brass ring, but we ran out of time before we could grasp it. On the other hand, at an event like this, a second-place showing is pretty darn impressive, especially in a difficult year like this one. I’m very proud of my teammates, who even when the Hunt was at its most frustrating, displayed nothing but encouragement and good humor (and waffles and chocolate-chip cookies). Plus, their puzzle-solving ability is nothing short of awesome, and I say that as someone who believes the word “awesome” is suffering from serious overuse.

Congrats to my friend Dan Katz, who was on the winning team. Dan has headed up many great Mystery Hunts, and I know that any hunt that involves his participation is a hunt worth looking forward to. As I write this, I am still very tired, despite having slept last night for thirteen hours. My feet and legs still hurt, though not as bad as they did yesterday. Full recovery is going to take a while. And yet somehow, I am already itching for next year.

A couple of people contacted me yesterday to ask if I was playing a trick: Were those really random words? Or did I throw an actual metapuzzle at you to see if anyone would notice?

It is certainly tempting to try to sneak a real puzzle past you folks, but I haven’t attempted it yet. For a start, I’m not convinced it’s possible — I have a feeling you guys would see through that in a heartbeat. Also, I’m enjoying the random game far too much to waste a day on a silly prank.

So yesterday’s words were totally random, though I understand why people might have thought otherwise. The winning solution, by Greg deBeer, was so straightforward, it seemed like it must have been there by design.

The words were:

HAGIOGRAPHY
INTENSITY
PAY UP
DEJECTED
GRUDGE

Greg’s answer:

“You may notice that the first letter in each word is duplicated in that word exactly once. If you look at the letter before the duplicate, you will see:

gruDge
payUp
hagiograPhy
dejectEd
intenSity

Given that we were looking for DUPES in the first place, this is a rather elegant meta.”

I’ll say.

Let’s do one more round, and since it’s the final game before the Mystery Hunt begins, let’s crank up the difficulty by throwing in an extra word:

ANCHORWOMAN
MUSTARD
CHAUFFEUR
LUMINOUS
SKIMOBILE
VIBRANT

Good luck!

Thousands of puzzlers around the country are vibrating in excitement: This Friday, the MIT Mystery Hunt kicks off! Many of us will soon be locked away in uncomfortable classrooms, staring at insane puzzles with no instructions, fighting off exhaustion and trying to have the flash of insight that will turn us, momentarily, into puzzling heroes. For a certain kind of person — and I am one of them — it is one of the highlights of the year.

Like many puzzle hunts, the key to winning is in solving not just the puzzles but the “metapuzzles” — you take all the answers to the various puzzles, do some wordplay magic, and come up with the secret word that will unlock the next round in the hunt.

In preparation for the Hunt, I’ve created a few practice metapuzzles for my team to solve. I’ll post those next week. But as we have learned in the past, some puzzlers are so amazing at solving “metas” that they can do it even when there is no puzzle to solve. You can toss out a few randomly chosen words, and these people will transform those words into a metapuzzle, which they will then solve. It shouldn’t be possible, but somehow, it is.

That’s the game of Spaghetti in a nutshell: I provide you with some words, randomly selected from an abridged dictionary. (The 60K-word New Merriam-Webster Dictionary.) You pretend those words are part of a well-crafted metapuzzle, and you try to solve it. Or, if you can’t figure out a “solution,” you can read other peoples’ attempts, and vote for the ones you like best. (You can vote more than once.)

As a warmup to this year’s Mystery Hunt, we’ll be playing Spaghetti over the next three days. So remove your brain from your head, twist it into a pretzel, but it back inside your skull, and come up with a meta-answer that makes use of the following five words:

AURA
FORTHWITH
XENOPHOBIA
INDISTINCT
DWARF

Good luck!

“Wait,” my daughter said. “He wants a gun?” She was astounded. Before we started watching A Christmas Story on Friday night, she had asked what it was about, and I said it was about growing up in the 1940s, a time before television and the Internet and video games. And specifically, I said, it was about a 9-year-old boy who wants a special gift for Christmas.

“Is that a real gun?” Lea asked, still very puzzled. We had just watched the opening scene of the movie, where Ralphie sees the rifle for the first time, in a department store window.

“It’s a toy gun,” I said. “But you can shoot it.”

“What does it shoot? Does it shoot bullets?”

“No. Not real bullets. BBs.”

“Could you shoot a person with it?” she asked. She knew nothing, or perhaps very little, of the carnage that had taken place earlier that day, half an hour away from us. We don’t keep her in a bubble — my wife and I had a very active discussion about current events over dinner — but we didn’t feel we needed to shove the details in her face, either. Later, after the movie, she would catch me reading the news on my iPad, and though I closed it quickly, she caught a glimpse of the picture on the New York Times Web site and asked me what that was. I told her I didn’t want to discuss it right before she went to bed, but she persisted, and I told it to her plain. She asked if the shooter was dead. I said that he was. She said, okay, and kissed me goodnight.

But that was later. “Could you shoot a person with that thing?” she asked, referring to Ralphie’s dream present.

“You could shoot a person with it, yes,” I said. “You couldn’t kill a person with it, I don’t think, but it would certainly hurt. You could kill a small animal or a bird with it.”

“Huh,” she said, and then she sat back and enjoyed the movie. I’d seen A Christmas Story about 50,000 times before, of course, but this was the first time for my daughter. It really is a very good movie. The young Peter Billingsley, with his guileless blue eyes, is fantastic, and I’d forgotten just how many great lines Jean Shepherd gets off as the narrator.

In the end, Ralphie gets his air rifle, though I’d forgotten exactly how that happens. After all the Christmas presents are supposedly unwrapped, his father points Ralphie to one more gift hiding in the corner. The father has done this on his own; the mom had no idea. “Aw, I had one when I was eight years old,” the father tells his wife as she stares at him.

The rifle Ralphie desires is a Red Ryder model, and it turns out that the fictional cowboy Red Ryder was an actual thing — a long-running character, who started off in the comics and then jumped to the radio and movies and television. He was, of course, far from the only Western hero of that era. Head over to Old Time Radio Westerns and you can hear some of these shows even now: The Lone Ranger (soon to released as a big-budget remake), The Cisco Kid, Gunsmoke.

There was a radio show about Wild Bill Hickok, who was of course a real person, a central figure in America’s fascination with the Old West — a West settled by men with guns; men who would go on to become idols for a generation of little boys.

People like to express puzzlement about America’s relationship to guns. But it is not very hard to figure out how guns became so deeply embedded in the American DNA. Guns have a prominent, important place in our history, and so do the men who held those guns. Many an American hero would not have been a hero without that gun. Those heroes became figures of American folklore, and those stories inspired comic books and radio shows, which in turn gave way to an ocean of American-made movies and television shows.

It’s not complicated. History and culture conspired to make us who we are today.

We perceive ourselves as a nation of gun nuts because we have a long history where that was true. But our evolution is in fact moving us away from guns. Oh, there are pockets of enthusiasm and there always will be, but in general, the romance of the man with a gun has been fading for a long time. We have a more complicated relationship with our history — no longer is the cowboy automatically the good guy and the Indian automatically the villain. We have a better understanding of what a soldier goes through out there on the battlefield — American men will never again rush en masse to join the armed forces, as they did during the World Wars.

How many people would now buy a working rifle for a child? A lot fewer than when Jean Shepherd was growing up in Indiana.

Indeed, according to this round-up of gun-related data, both gun ownership and gun violence are in serious decline. It’s still much higher than pretty much any other developed country, but we are working against the last 150 years of our history, and there is no easy way to shorten the path.

In the wake of Friday’s violence, we can pass new gun laws and probably will. It is possible — though hardly assured — that these new laws will be effective. A more surefire weapon against American gun culture is simply the passage of time… hastened, unfortunately, by horrors like Newtown. At least the evolution of our gun culture is heading in the right direction, as reflected by the disbelief in my child’s eyes, that a 9-year-old would even want a gun, much less that a parent would buy him one.

You’ll see a new page called “Puzzles!” You will never, ever guess what you will see if you click on that link. That’s right: Puzzles! I finally got around to creating an archive of the various things I’ve created over the years, not including crosswords I’ve sold to outlets like the New York Times. I imagine they get a little huffy if you give those away for free. You will find, however, a link to Game Night Crosswords, my Kickstarter project from 2009 — if you didn’t cough up the five bucks to buy it back then, now you can have it for free!

I imagine the puzzle-interested segment of my small readership has already solved most of the puzzles in the archive, but hey, maybe something slipped by you over the years. Go check it out.