Entry tags:
Puzzles!
'tis Puzzle Season! MIT Mystery Hunt starts in less than 48 hours. I'm excited to be going up to Cambridge again this year after missing Hunt last year for ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
freeradical42's wedding. Well, that plus my team finishing the Hunt before Shabbos was over so I couldn't even remotely puzzle.
Death and Mayhem, the team running the Hunt this year, announced a few months ago that they were planning to design the Hunt to not be as fun for larger teams, suggesting a maximum team size of 75 members. Palindrome had about 160 people last year, and a few other teams were in that range, including the ultimate winner, and some of the big teams blew through the Hunt very quickly. That was a problem for some people, especially those who think that the Hunt is at its core an MIT student event and should be welcoming to smaller teams of MIT undergrads as well as the large teams of puzzle enthusiast carpetbaggers who rush in for the weekend. As a carpetbagger myself, my feelings are mixed. I obviously want to keep attending myself. I also think a big part of why the MIT Mystery Hunt is such a special event for everyone is because of the culture of constantly pushing for bigger, better, more elaborate and interesting puzzle challenges, and a fair portion of that culture comes from the carpetbagging puzzle enthusiasts. Also, the reason I'm personally on a large team is because I'm on a team with a fully open admission policy, and that's how I was able to join despite only knowing one or two people on the team initially. It's hard to regulate the size of open teams. So I dunno, while I was personally annoyed at how quickly my team finished the Hunt last year, I've seen plenty of fun Hunts that challenged large teams while still being enjoyable for smaller teams, and I think that ought to be the ideal.
There are a variety of ways to handicap larger teams, which will have differing effects, and it's unclear which we will see this weekend. One method is puzzle release bottlenecks- time limiting the release of new puzzles so that it's difficult for teams that are fast because they are large and parallelize work well to build up too much of an advantage. This is largely seen as the 'fair' way to handicap large teams, but since everyone sees the same Hunt, but it has the potential to backfire and end up also bottlenecking smaller teams, resulting in a long, sloggy Hunt. Another way, less overtly 'fair', is to have puzzles or events that are actually handicapped based on size. You could require teams with over 75 people to solve harder puzzles or more puzzles, or to deploy more people to solve a puzzle. The problem with that is that it could mean extra work for puzzle writers. Or contrariwise you could lighten the load on smaller teams- many recent Hunts have had automated mechanisms to deploy hints to stuck teams, and those mechanisms could be adjusted based on team size to give smaller teams access to more hints. Or you could just write a short Hunt altogether and expect that the teams that stay big will finish fast, and thus be disappointed at how few puzzles any individual puzzler saw, and hope that if the trend continues they'll learn their lesson.
Our expectation is that time release bottlenecking will be the mechanism used to throttle big teams, but whichever method used, Palindrome decided to split into two teams for this year to slim down and match the Hunt runners' recommendation better. So a fair portion of the people I looked forward to Hunting with won't be on my team this year, but that's become par for the course. At this point I think there are about six teams I need to visit during pre-Hunt happenings to say hi to particular Hunter friends. I'm hoping Palindrome, this year known as Flower/Ewe/Werewolf, will still be a competitive team. I'm looking forward to a really good weekend.
freeradical42's wedding. Well, that plus my team finishing the Hunt before Shabbos was over so I couldn't even remotely puzzle.Death and Mayhem, the team running the Hunt this year, announced a few months ago that they were planning to design the Hunt to not be as fun for larger teams, suggesting a maximum team size of 75 members. Palindrome had about 160 people last year, and a few other teams were in that range, including the ultimate winner, and some of the big teams blew through the Hunt very quickly. That was a problem for some people, especially those who think that the Hunt is at its core an MIT student event and should be welcoming to smaller teams of MIT undergrads as well as the large teams of puzzle enthusiast carpetbaggers who rush in for the weekend. As a carpetbagger myself, my feelings are mixed. I obviously want to keep attending myself. I also think a big part of why the MIT Mystery Hunt is such a special event for everyone is because of the culture of constantly pushing for bigger, better, more elaborate and interesting puzzle challenges, and a fair portion of that culture comes from the carpetbagging puzzle enthusiasts. Also, the reason I'm personally on a large team is because I'm on a team with a fully open admission policy, and that's how I was able to join despite only knowing one or two people on the team initially. It's hard to regulate the size of open teams. So I dunno, while I was personally annoyed at how quickly my team finished the Hunt last year, I've seen plenty of fun Hunts that challenged large teams while still being enjoyable for smaller teams, and I think that ought to be the ideal.
There are a variety of ways to handicap larger teams, which will have differing effects, and it's unclear which we will see this weekend. One method is puzzle release bottlenecks- time limiting the release of new puzzles so that it's difficult for teams that are fast because they are large and parallelize work well to build up too much of an advantage. This is largely seen as the 'fair' way to handicap large teams, but since everyone sees the same Hunt, but it has the potential to backfire and end up also bottlenecking smaller teams, resulting in a long, sloggy Hunt. Another way, less overtly 'fair', is to have puzzles or events that are actually handicapped based on size. You could require teams with over 75 people to solve harder puzzles or more puzzles, or to deploy more people to solve a puzzle. The problem with that is that it could mean extra work for puzzle writers. Or contrariwise you could lighten the load on smaller teams- many recent Hunts have had automated mechanisms to deploy hints to stuck teams, and those mechanisms could be adjusted based on team size to give smaller teams access to more hints. Or you could just write a short Hunt altogether and expect that the teams that stay big will finish fast, and thus be disappointed at how few puzzles any individual puzzler saw, and hope that if the trend continues they'll learn their lesson.
Our expectation is that time release bottlenecking will be the mechanism used to throttle big teams, but whichever method used, Palindrome decided to split into two teams for this year to slim down and match the Hunt runners' recommendation better. So a fair portion of the people I looked forward to Hunting with won't be on my team this year, but that's become par for the course. At this point I think there are about six teams I need to visit during pre-Hunt happenings to say hi to particular Hunter friends. I'm hoping Palindrome, this year known as Flower/Ewe/Werewolf, will still be a competitive team. I'm looking forward to a really good weekend.