MIT Mystery Hunt 2025
Jan. 31st, 2025 09:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretI don't think I plan to write a full Hunt writeup this year. Hunt was great. D&M did an amazing job of creating a large scale immersive puzzle experience. I think the puzzles were great, though I think I have a somewhat stronger preference than D&M does for puzzles where when you're on the right track, it feels like you're on the right track. And as usual, Palindrome were amazing people to solve puzzles with.
But I did want to write a more detailed spoilery write up of "abstract art and poems / concerning a pale blue dot / and many more friends", which turned out to be my favorite solving experience of Hunt.
The puzzle arrived at HQ in a ziplock bag as a bunch of small scraps of paper. Some of them were styled like magnetic poetry, but with a few words already connected. The rest were strips of paper with parts of an image on them.
The first thing we did was assemble the strips of paper. These resolved into prints of roughly twenty colorful abstract paintings, which we taped together. On the back of each painting was a quote from Shakespeare, largely quotes about celestial bodies as well as reflections on beauty. Each quote was missing one word, replaced with a number.
As we identified the quotes and the missing words, we realized that what these Shakespearean characters had in common was that they had all been used to name Uranian moons. This was the first of many art-science symmetries we found as we solved- Shakespeare quotes inspired by the beauty of astronomy, and astronomers inspired by Shakespeare's beauty.
Sorting the missing words in the quotes in numerical order, they guided us to sort the Uranian moons by distance to Uranus's surface, which I think was the first time I was struck by the mad genius of this puzzle. This was a puzzle with such a specific set of ideas underpinning it and such a specific vision for how the puzzler should interact with it. The puzzle is asking you to perform a series of translations from the vocabulary of science to the vocabulary of art, as if it's the most normal thing in the world.
Turning to the magnet poetry pieces, we found that two or three pieces could be assembled together into a haiku on an astronomical theme. These, we found by googling, turned out to be abstracts from papers presented at meetings of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which has a tradition of haiku abstracts, because again the very clear vision of this puzzle was to explore the way scientists use art and artists use science, over and over again. Why are LPSC abstracts in haiku form? Presumably primarily because it's silly fun, but also because there is value in the discipline, of trying to be precise enough in your description of your research to meet an arbitrary poetic constraint.
Tracking down the papers, we discovered that each paper had a figure in it that had been stylized (don't know if this was with AI or a photoshop filter or manual painting) into one of the abstract paintings we'd assembled earlier. This was fucking nuts, I love it so much. The emergent beauty of scientific visualization!! Every time i identified one of the figures I got chills seeing how this concise representation of data had been tranformed into something that was exclusively about visual beauty. We identified the figure matches and extracted a letter from each figure that overlapped with a question mark on the painting, and ordering these in Uranian moons distance order it spelled out the answer.
The overriding idea of this puzzle was that art and science are both about the pursuit of beauty even when it pulls you into unexpected places, and I love that so much. Even more so, the structure of this presentation as a puzzle was brilliant because it forced solvers to reenact the exploratory, experimental nature of both the artistic process and the scientific method. Rather than a lecture on science and art, we got to briefly inhabit a little STEAM laboratory. Angela Collier had a great YouTube video recently on the corruption of the idea of STEAM, when what it was intended to be was precisely this: pedagogy where the core tenets of science and the core tenets of art reinforce each other and teach us how to be creative and thoughtful in our exploration of the world. I loved how much this puzzle experientially put us in that zone.
But I did want to write a more detailed spoilery write up of "abstract art and poems / concerning a pale blue dot / and many more friends", which turned out to be my favorite solving experience of Hunt.
The puzzle arrived at HQ in a ziplock bag as a bunch of small scraps of paper. Some of them were styled like magnetic poetry, but with a few words already connected. The rest were strips of paper with parts of an image on them.
The first thing we did was assemble the strips of paper. These resolved into prints of roughly twenty colorful abstract paintings, which we taped together. On the back of each painting was a quote from Shakespeare, largely quotes about celestial bodies as well as reflections on beauty. Each quote was missing one word, replaced with a number.
As we identified the quotes and the missing words, we realized that what these Shakespearean characters had in common was that they had all been used to name Uranian moons. This was the first of many art-science symmetries we found as we solved- Shakespeare quotes inspired by the beauty of astronomy, and astronomers inspired by Shakespeare's beauty.
Sorting the missing words in the quotes in numerical order, they guided us to sort the Uranian moons by distance to Uranus's surface, which I think was the first time I was struck by the mad genius of this puzzle. This was a puzzle with such a specific set of ideas underpinning it and such a specific vision for how the puzzler should interact with it. The puzzle is asking you to perform a series of translations from the vocabulary of science to the vocabulary of art, as if it's the most normal thing in the world.
Turning to the magnet poetry pieces, we found that two or three pieces could be assembled together into a haiku on an astronomical theme. These, we found by googling, turned out to be abstracts from papers presented at meetings of the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which has a tradition of haiku abstracts, because again the very clear vision of this puzzle was to explore the way scientists use art and artists use science, over and over again. Why are LPSC abstracts in haiku form? Presumably primarily because it's silly fun, but also because there is value in the discipline, of trying to be precise enough in your description of your research to meet an arbitrary poetic constraint.
Tracking down the papers, we discovered that each paper had a figure in it that had been stylized (don't know if this was with AI or a photoshop filter or manual painting) into one of the abstract paintings we'd assembled earlier. This was fucking nuts, I love it so much. The emergent beauty of scientific visualization!! Every time i identified one of the figures I got chills seeing how this concise representation of data had been tranformed into something that was exclusively about visual beauty. We identified the figure matches and extracted a letter from each figure that overlapped with a question mark on the painting, and ordering these in Uranian moons distance order it spelled out the answer.
The overriding idea of this puzzle was that art and science are both about the pursuit of beauty even when it pulls you into unexpected places, and I love that so much. Even more so, the structure of this presentation as a puzzle was brilliant because it forced solvers to reenact the exploratory, experimental nature of both the artistic process and the scientific method. Rather than a lecture on science and art, we got to briefly inhabit a little STEAM laboratory. Angela Collier had a great YouTube video recently on the corruption of the idea of STEAM, when what it was intended to be was precisely this: pedagogy where the core tenets of science and the core tenets of art reinforce each other and teach us how to be creative and thoughtful in our exploration of the world. I loved how much this puzzle experientially put us in that zone.