Puzzles!

[seekingferret]

'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 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.

Comments

[jack]

Oh cool. That does sound awesome.

I'm really not sure what I'd do in that situation. One is that if the event did split into two, one for smaller teams, one for massive over the top stuff, it's painful at first but if it works, people would probably get used to it fast.

Another is to encourage large teams to split, to have people who handle sign-up and stream open or large teams into several sibling teams.

Another (I don't know if this would be plausible) is to have self-scaling challenge, things that require one thing from each person or similar, so more players is possible, but has specific disadvantages as well as advantages (I can see that going badly, fostering resentment at people who sign up without pulling any weight, but also going well, encouraging more active cooperation).

I hope it works well!

[seekingferret]

It's hard to split Mystery Hunt into two events, since its only consistent game mechanic is that a coin is hidden somewhere on campus and the first team to find it wins the Hunt and has to write the next year's Hunt. Either one of the two parallel versions of the Hunt would have to lose the core mechanic, or there would end up with two coins and two teams running parallel Hunts, which is a complexity nobody wants.

I mean, for years the status quo has been that practically speaking, only five or eight teams really have a shot of winning and are trying to win in any given year, out of the thirty or forty teams that come. That generally hasn't mattered, as there is plenty of fun to be had without trying to win, and a lot of teams don't want to win because writing next year's Hunt is a big undertaking not everyone wants. The team I was on for my first four or five Hunts was consistently middle of the pack and we had a lot of fun because SO MANY AWESOME PUZZLES even though we never saw the endgame. Now I'm on a team that usually sees the endgame and comes close to winning, and I really enjoy that experience, but I also miss a lot of the people I was solving with on my old team and would be fine going back to a team that didn't necessarily compete to win, if circumstances compelled it.

There is one part of Hunt that self-scales in a way similar to what you describe- the mini-scavenger Hunt nearly always scales with team size (last year's as an example: http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/2017/puzzle/replenish_the_treasury.html). This is generally accepted, but note that scaling like this means that bigger teams submissions take longer to judge, as they have more items, and Game Control time is a precious resource.


But at the end of the day the fundamental problem is that Mystery Hunt-style puzzling is any-resource-goes. You can google things, you can write a computer program to solve that sudoku rather than solving it yourself, and you can call in any domain-specific expert you need at any given time to help you. So any effort to limit team size through the rules goes against the anything-goes principle.

[brainwane]

I wish you well! I know some people on Codex, and I worked with some folks who LOVE the Hunt and even have a "why you should use our software during the Hunt to coordinate your team" marketing page (albeit not linked from the main Zulip website) .

I have a lot of personal flaws and some of them combine to make me very very leery of trying to come visit the Hunt to be part of a team for an afternoon. Maybe someday.

But at the end of the day the fundamental problem is that Mystery Hunt-style puzzling is any-resource-goes. You can google things, you can write a computer program to solve that sudoku rather than solving it yourself, and you can call in any domain-specific expert you need at any given time to help you. So any effort to limit team size through the rules goes against the anything-goes principle.

You've reminded me of something Daniel Davies once wrote about Formula 1 versus NASCAR although the situations are quite different!

[seekingferret]

The NASCAR/F1 comparison makes a lot of sense. I don't make the same kind of aesthetic judgement Davies does- both freeform Puzzle Hunts like Mystery Hunt and puzzle competitions with clear restrictions like World Puzzle Championship are IMO worthwhile tests of skill. But they're very different and trying to reduce the scale of Mystery Hunt teams runs the risk of turning Mystery Hunt into something more restricted. Knowing that teams are able to throw any resources available at a puzzle allows puzzles to be written that otherwise you'd think were too difficult or required too obscure knowledge, and that's one of the really special things about Hunt. Things that are more restricted can be fun, but it's a kind of fun that can be had elsewhere.

[calledtovienna]

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.

I always felt that it was almost the other way around actually -- the perception was that carpetbagger puzzle solvers tended to have, and do better, at much more standardized puzzles ("oh, yes, this is a puzzle of a known form that we all know about, so we all know how to solve it") rather than the more bizarre ornate and original stuff.

Interesting to me that it looks different from the other side ("if you just leave it to the MIT kids, it will be a thousand duck conundrums!"), so I wanted to share that. I don't have an opinion, since I am no longer an undergrad, and I don't hunt anymore (though one of these days, I should get into town for hunt, since it is an unofficial alumni reunion for my dormitory).

For a long time, the regulation on large teams was that, eventually, they won, and then the writing team would split off (because 160 people can't write a hunt), and basically never rejoin. I guess that broke down at some point, I am pretty excited about the idea of smaller teams (75 is not that small!), though also, see above about not hunting as much anymore.

[seekingferret]

I think I'm being misconstrued, though I'm not sure if it's because I misspoke in some way. I'm not making a claim about whether MIT-people or non-MIT puzzlers make more ornate or bizarre or original puzzles. I mean, NPL people like word puzzles so when they write Hunts you get more word puzzles, and Mathcamp people like computational puzzles, and when they write Hunts you get more of those, but in general everyone just writes the best puzzles they can and I can think of incredibly baroque puzzles written by both MIT people and non-MIT people.

I'm just making an argument about the Arms Race. My claim is that the fact that Mystery Hunt is this massive event with thousands of attendees, many of whom travel from far away just for this weekend, pushes everyone to really bring their A game when writing puzzles. If it were primarily a student event involving smaller teams, it wouldn't distinguish itself from any of the dozens of other puzzling events around. Of course, we carpetbaggers are guests at MIT, and if the MIT people preferred it to be a primarily student event, they could do it and there wouldn't be anything I could do about it.

About the regulation on large teams, Luck did fall apart after writing the '16 Hunt... and something like half of the team went to Palindrome and half the team went to Death and Mayhem, and those teams massively swelled and romped through SETEC's Hunt in eighteen hours. So yeah, that's why the organic mechanism kinda fell apart. On the other hand, this year SETEC won again in spite of being on the small side even compared to the greatly scaled down large teams we had this year, so.... Remains to be seen if teams like Palindrome and Codex that split in half this year will un-split, and remains to be seen what'll happen to Death and Mayhem after writing this year, but we may see a return to larger teams and we might not.