Nethack
A clever and brutal roguelike game. Try it from your terminal with this simple command:
$ telnet nethack.alt.org
This is me beating it for the first and as of yet only time:
Mystery Hunt 2014
The Mystery Hunt is an event held every year at MIT in which many teams, some with hundreds of members, binge-solve puzzles without instructions for around 3 days to find a coin hidden somewhere on campus.
The hunt is always organized by the previous year's winning team. Last year, the team in charge forgot to sanitize their database inputs, and the name of the winning team was actually the entire text of Atlas Shrugged. This year, the theme for the hunt was Alice in Wonderland.
I asked my good friend and long-time-ago roommate Ani, now a sophomore at MIT, if he could pair me up with any teams doing the hunt. And so I became one of about 30 members of ADPhi Mystery.
Our headquarters were in ADPhi's library. We collaborated on puzzles using Google Drive, submitted answers via a website, then our team would receive a phone call informing us that we had the solution or that unfortunately, we were wrong.
Physical puzzle
We split up into groups. I helped put together a bunch of physical puzzle pieces, and the final image showed paths of hexadecimal numbers with a white "+" symbol in the background. So... addition? But reading along the paths yielded hexadecimal values (colors?), and we looked up their names:
| Hex | Color | Name |
|---|---|---|
| FFE4B5 | ◼ |
Moccasin |
| 7FFFD4 | ◼ |
Aquamarine |
| E6E6FA | ◼ |
Lavender |
| CD853F | ◼ |
Peru |
| FF0000 | ◼ |
Red |
| F0FFFF | ◼ |
Azure |
| 7FFF00 | ◼ |
Chartreuse |
| D8BFD8 | ◼ |
Thistle |
| 4B0088 | ◼ |
Indigo |
| FF7F50 | ◼ |
Coral |
| 50C872 | ◼ |
Emerald |
The initial letters of the names form a word: "MALPRACTICE." So the "+" was just a white cross hinting at something medical. All the puzzles involved a lot of guesswork—there were absolutely no instructions, but sometimes the title of the puzzle was a little hint.