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The IAP Mystery Hunt is a puzzle competition held each January at MIT. Hundreds of people in dozens of teams work for 48+ hours straight to find an unusual coin hidden on campus and the right to run the Hunt the next year. Participants come from around the country and play remotely from around the world.1 Structure of the Hunt
The team running the Hunt can make any changes they desire, and the structure changes to some degree from year to year. However, the general form has been constant since at least the mid-nineties.
At noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Day participants gather in the lobby of building 7 at MIT. Recent Hunts have had around 20-25 teams participating, with each team containing as few as five and as many as fifty puzzle solvers (larger teams usually send a small delegation to the opening festivities). The organizers present a short skit which reveals the theme of the hunt, such as Carmen Sandiego in 1999 or the Wizard of Oz in 2000. The theme is always a closely guarded secret before the Hunt begins. The teams are then told to find the coin in the context of the theme. For instance, in 1999 teams were told to find a rare coin that Carmen Sandiego had stolen. The first round of puzzles is handed out (in recent years a URL has been provided in lieu of paper copies) and teams return to their headquarters around campus.
Each round consists of somewhere between six and fifteen puzzles. The answer to each puzzle is usually a word or phrase. When a team thinks they know the answer to a puzzle, they call it in to Hunt headquarters, and the Hunt organizers confirm it. The set of all answers in a round form a meta-puzzle. There are no instructions to the meta-puzzle; once a team has all the answers, they still need to figure out what to do with them. The answer to the meta-puzzle is usually another word or phrase. When a team correctly calls in the answer to the meta-puzzle they are finished with that round.
A Hunt is usually comprised of four to eight rounds. Each round is released at a predetermined time, but are released early to teams that finish all previous rounds. Some recent Hunts have had "hidden" rounds, or different ways of combining puzzles into metapuzzles - it's all up to the team writing the Hunt. When a team has finished all the rounds in the Hunt, they begin the final runaround. Usually several teams make it to the final runaround, which may take a couple hours to complete. The first team to complete the runaround and find the coin wins the Hunt and starts planning for next year!
2 Types of Puzzles
Any type of puzzle is fair game. There are regular crosswords, cryptic crosswords, logic puzzles, jigsaw puzzles, anagrams, connect-the-dots , ciphers, riddles, paint by number s, and word search es. There are puzzles that require the knowledge of quantum mechanicswavefunctions of an electron in a hydrogen atom possessing definite energy (increasing downward: n 1,2,3,. and angular momentum (increasing across: s p d . Brighter areas correspond to higher probability density for a position measurement. The angular mom, stereoisomerA stereoisomer is an isomer of a reference molecule that has the same atom-to-atom connections as the reference molecule, but has a shape that is nonsuperimposable with it. Types Enantiomer Diastereomer.s, ancient Greek, KlingonThe Klingon language (in Klingon, tlhIngan Hol is a constructed language created by Marc Okrand for Paramount Pictures and spoken by Klingons in the fictional Star Trek universe. He designed the language with Object Verb Subject word order to give an alie, BachBach is the surname of a number of people: The Johann Sebastian Bach Family : Johann Sebastian Bach ( Composer, organist) the most well-known of the Bachs : Wilhelm Friedemann Bach (Composer, organist) : Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (Composer, harpsichordist preludes, coinageCoinage is: currency The right or process of making coins The creation of a neologism, or new word; see word coinage. of AfricaAfrica is the world's second-largest continent in both area and population, after Asia. 30,244,050 km2 (11,677,240 mi2) including the islands, it covers 20. 3% of the total land area on Earth, and with over 800 million human inhabitants it accounts for ar, and BarbieBarbie is the world's best selling doll and was first sold on March 9, 1959. The best selling Barbie was one released in 1992, Totally Hair Barbie, with stylable hair so long it reached from her head down to her toes. Development Ruth Handler had noted th dolls. Some puzzles are pictures, others are audio files or physical objects. Many puzzles require sending people to find certain locations on the MIT campus or in the Boston area. There is usually a scavenger hunt and a puzzle that involves bringing food to the team running the Hunt (one privilege of winning). Other puzzles involve playing games such as four square or video games. Many of the puzzles require an in-depth knowledge of MIT's campus and culture.
