Last weekend was the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. It was my 6th time participating, and the 2nd in a row with my current team, Central Services (although three other times were with most of the same people, on Pturnips in 2005-2006 and Unseen in 2007). (I just realized that the only other Hunt I've posted about here was in 2005. I intended to write it up each year but I guess I never got around to it.) This year, teams were challenged to Escape From Zyzzlvaria, traveling across the galaxy in the year 3009 to find and rescue Captain Blastoid and her crew.
I did two things differently this year than previous years. One was to get a hotel room for the weekend, so I wouldn't have to drive home to Billerica and back several times during the Hunt. (Our team headquarters—two classrooms on campus—included one seminar room in which several people were sleeping at various times, but I think it was more of a napping area; as far as I know no one stayed at HQ for the whole Hunt, and, regardless, I wanted a more substantial amount of sleep than I could have gotten on a classroom floor.) I stayed at the Royal Sonesta, over by the Cambridgeside Galleria; it's about a mile from campus, so I still ended up driving back and forth a few times, but it was still better than driving 40 minutes home. (If it hadn't been 7F and/or snowing all weekend, I might have walked, but that wasn't going to happen this year.) Fortunately I had no problems finding parking spaces along Memorial Drive, though I had to spend a while brushing snow off my car a couple times.
The other thing I did differently was commit to the night shift. Last year, our solving progress seemed to stall out each night when most of the team went home; I stayed into the early morning, but there were only a couple other people with me after about 2am. This year, I announced to our team ahead of time that I planned to be there all night, in the hopes that others would join me so that we'd have a critical mass of solvers making steady progress around the clock. I also prefer being there in the off-hours when it's less crowded and I have more of a chance of seeing puzzles when they are new rather than after all the easy parts have been finished by someone else. So, I showed up at 8pm on Friday, stayed until 10am, then came back at 8pm on Saturday. I planned to stay from then until the end of the Hunt, which is usually sometime on Sunday, but by 5pm it still hadn't ended so I left. I came back around 1am on Monday morning, since the Hunt still hadn't ended, but it finally ended about two hours later when the team Beginner's Luck found the Covertly Operational Inversion Node (or COIN) at 3:03am.
The results of these two decisions were mixed. I didn't get much sleep at the hotel during the day on Saturday; the noise from housekeeping and the other guests coming and going was just too distracting. It was still good just to lie down in a big bed in an empty room, not to mention taking a shower, but the time I saved by not driving home may have been wasted (and had I gone home I would probably have been more rested and thus in better puzzle-solving shape). Next year I will probably be living closer to Cambridge, so commuting would be less painful; another idea is to pay the extra bucks for the Marriott, which is close enough to walk. That might let me try polyphasic sleep, i.e. several naps rather than one long sleep per day. We'll see how appealing that sounds when next year comes around.
There were other problems with taking the night shift. For one, despite having spent the three or four weeks beforehand sleeping from dawn to dusk each day, I still found myself pretty fried after about 4am Saturday morning. (It probably didn't help that I spent the last couple days before the Hunt working hard finishing up a programming project—more about that later, maybe—and only slept from noon to 5pm on Friday.) Sunday morning and afternoon especially were pretty much a daze, although this was compounded by expecting the Hunt to end at any moment. In retrospect I would have been better off leaving in the morning again and coming back relatively rested for Sunday evening, but I would have been disgruntled if it had ended at, say, 8pm Sunday.
The biggest problem with my plan was due to the way this year's Hunt was structured: it was split into two phases, and you had to complete a single meta-meta-puzzle at the end of phase one before you could open any puzzles from phase two. We solved the third meta-puzzle around 3am Saturday morning, but we needed to solve the remaining two to get the rewards that would let us start solving the meta-meta. Actually, by this point, the team running the hunt (Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight, or, as they were known this year, United Planetary Galactic Allied Federation Society, or UPGAFS) had decided to give teams the reward for their fifth meta three hours after they solved their fourth meta, but we still had no clue how to solve either of our remaining metas, nor any of the three remaining puzzles in those rounds. This meant that even though we did have 8-10 people for most of the night, we were just banging our heads and making no progress for six hours until UPGAFS mercifully opened phase two for all teams at 9am on Saturday. The upshot is that, for my first 14 hours at the Hunt, I only significantly contributed to solving three puzzles, and spent most of the time staring at old puzzles that had been picked over hours earlier by the rest of the team.
So, my plans for making steady progress through the night and getting to work on new puzzles were pretty much completely foiled. Saturday night went better, though, despite being back to a skeleton crew of about 4-6 people; we had plenty of puzzles to work on, I contributed to a good handful of them, and I even managed to help crack the phase 1 meta-meta, which we finally solved around 8am Sunday. In theory I think the night shift schedule should work pretty well, it just didn't work out this year. But I'm not sure if I'll try it again next year.
...Okay, since my sleep schedule is still pretty messed up, I really need to go to bed now, so I'll end this entry here. More tomorrow, including video from when we rescued Captain Blastoid!
I did two things differently this year than previous years. One was to get a hotel room for the weekend, so I wouldn't have to drive home to Billerica and back several times during the Hunt. (Our team headquarters—two classrooms on campus—included one seminar room in which several people were sleeping at various times, but I think it was more of a napping area; as far as I know no one stayed at HQ for the whole Hunt, and, regardless, I wanted a more substantial amount of sleep than I could have gotten on a classroom floor.) I stayed at the Royal Sonesta, over by the Cambridgeside Galleria; it's about a mile from campus, so I still ended up driving back and forth a few times, but it was still better than driving 40 minutes home. (If it hadn't been 7F and/or snowing all weekend, I might have walked, but that wasn't going to happen this year.) Fortunately I had no problems finding parking spaces along Memorial Drive, though I had to spend a while brushing snow off my car a couple times.
The other thing I did differently was commit to the night shift. Last year, our solving progress seemed to stall out each night when most of the team went home; I stayed into the early morning, but there were only a couple other people with me after about 2am. This year, I announced to our team ahead of time that I planned to be there all night, in the hopes that others would join me so that we'd have a critical mass of solvers making steady progress around the clock. I also prefer being there in the off-hours when it's less crowded and I have more of a chance of seeing puzzles when they are new rather than after all the easy parts have been finished by someone else. So, I showed up at 8pm on Friday, stayed until 10am, then came back at 8pm on Saturday. I planned to stay from then until the end of the Hunt, which is usually sometime on Sunday, but by 5pm it still hadn't ended so I left. I came back around 1am on Monday morning, since the Hunt still hadn't ended, but it finally ended about two hours later when the team Beginner's Luck found the Covertly Operational Inversion Node (or COIN) at 3:03am.
The results of these two decisions were mixed. I didn't get much sleep at the hotel during the day on Saturday; the noise from housekeeping and the other guests coming and going was just too distracting. It was still good just to lie down in a big bed in an empty room, not to mention taking a shower, but the time I saved by not driving home may have been wasted (and had I gone home I would probably have been more rested and thus in better puzzle-solving shape). Next year I will probably be living closer to Cambridge, so commuting would be less painful; another idea is to pay the extra bucks for the Marriott, which is close enough to walk. That might let me try polyphasic sleep, i.e. several naps rather than one long sleep per day. We'll see how appealing that sounds when next year comes around.
There were other problems with taking the night shift. For one, despite having spent the three or four weeks beforehand sleeping from dawn to dusk each day, I still found myself pretty fried after about 4am Saturday morning. (It probably didn't help that I spent the last couple days before the Hunt working hard finishing up a programming project—more about that later, maybe—and only slept from noon to 5pm on Friday.) Sunday morning and afternoon especially were pretty much a daze, although this was compounded by expecting the Hunt to end at any moment. In retrospect I would have been better off leaving in the morning again and coming back relatively rested for Sunday evening, but I would have been disgruntled if it had ended at, say, 8pm Sunday.
The biggest problem with my plan was due to the way this year's Hunt was structured: it was split into two phases, and you had to complete a single meta-meta-puzzle at the end of phase one before you could open any puzzles from phase two. We solved the third meta-puzzle around 3am Saturday morning, but we needed to solve the remaining two to get the rewards that would let us start solving the meta-meta. Actually, by this point, the team running the hunt (Evil Midnight Bombers What Bomb At Midnight, or, as they were known this year, United Planetary Galactic Allied Federation Society, or UPGAFS) had decided to give teams the reward for their fifth meta three hours after they solved their fourth meta, but we still had no clue how to solve either of our remaining metas, nor any of the three remaining puzzles in those rounds. This meant that even though we did have 8-10 people for most of the night, we were just banging our heads and making no progress for six hours until UPGAFS mercifully opened phase two for all teams at 9am on Saturday. The upshot is that, for my first 14 hours at the Hunt, I only significantly contributed to solving three puzzles, and spent most of the time staring at old puzzles that had been picked over hours earlier by the rest of the team.
So, my plans for making steady progress through the night and getting to work on new puzzles were pretty much completely foiled. Saturday night went better, though, despite being back to a skeleton crew of about 4-6 people; we had plenty of puzzles to work on, I contributed to a good handful of them, and I even managed to help crack the phase 1 meta-meta, which we finally solved around 8am Sunday. In theory I think the night shift schedule should work pretty well, it just didn't work out this year. But I'm not sure if I'll try it again next year.
...Okay, since my sleep schedule is still pretty messed up, I really need to go to bed now, so I'll end this entry here. More tomorrow, including video from when we rescued Captain Blastoid!
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I'm likewise a night shift person (didn't intend to be again this year, but it turned out to be better that way). I think it worked out a little better for us; we got our fourth meta at about 6:45am and then our fifth at 9:30am (yes, I'm proud of cracking that one just before going to bed), meaning we didn't end up using the "patience" method after all. I'm still trying to decide how I feel about the phase one metameta bottlenecking.
-Jennifer, Metaphysical Plant