My 2018 MIT Mystery Hunt Puzzles
I was on the writing team of this year’s hunt, which was based on the movie “Inside Out.” One of our goals was to create an easy first round to allow small teams to have a full hunt experience. Our first round consisted of 34 puzzles related to five basic emotions: joy, sadness, disgust, fear, and anger. Each emotion had its own meta puzzle. And the round had a meta-meta puzzle and a runaround. As I tend to write easy puzzles, I contributed three puzzles to this emotions round. The puzzles had references to corresponding emotions that were not needed for the solve path. They were inserted there for flavor.
- A Learning Path (jointly with Xavid) is a Nikoli-type logic puzzle that was targeted for new hunters. It contained self-referencing hints and solving techniques. It was in both disgust and fear.
- Word Search is a word search with a twist. The words are related to fear and sadness.
- Games Club (jointly with Sergei Bernstein) is a puzzle on the topic of combinatorial two-player games. It is pure sadness.
I also wrote another easy puzzle called A Tribute: 2010-2017 (jointly with Justin Melvin, Wesley Graybill, and Robin Diets ). Though the puzzle is easy, it is useful in solving it to be familiar with the MIT mystery hunt. This is why the puzzle didn’t fit the first emotions round.
I also wrote a very difficult puzzle called Murder at the Asylum. This is a monstrosity about liars and truth-tellers.
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Tanya Khovanova's Math Blog » Blog Archive » Mathy Puzzles at 2018 MIT Mystery Hunt:
[…] already posted an essay about the puzzles I wrote myself. Four of my five puzzles are math-related, so I am including them below for completeness. I will […]
19 February 2018, 4:36 pmFabio:
I really enjoyed “Murder at the Asylum”. It was fun solving the murder and finding out which kind each person was. Took me some hours, but pleasant hours! Thank you!
23 February 2018, 4:31 pm