The annual MIT Mystery Hunt is a game where small teams of MIT students solve games of all types to race to discover the location on campus of a small coin. The clues and games are fantastic and fascinating, so we might all want to look. The primary Mystery Hunt web site is at http://web.mit.edu/puzzle/www/index.html, while the clues for this year's challenge is at http://www.acme-corp.com/0101/. The puzzles are beautifully wrought and ingenious.

The challenge started in 1980 and has been the lead story in Games Magazine. The reward for winning is only pride and the responsibility of running the next year's hunt. (Well, when it started, the prize was a keg of beer or $50 to charity, but most years it was translated into a binge for everyone at the great Toscanini's Ice Cream.) In each year, roughly 300 people spend 50 hours (with 10 of sleep) before the winning team finds the penny. (Originally, it was an Indian Head penny, but now it has gone to a specially minted commemorative coin.) I am amazed that this contest has likely 'wasted' ~10,000 man-days of MIT students over the years.

We might see a Russcon Mystery Hunt on Wednesday!

One of my clues was simply "The longitude of Hun Kal". Well, we'd all stare at this for a minute then reach for the biggest atlas we can find. In it, you would find a town called "Kal" in HUNgary, which happened to have a longitude 20 degree east. So this would be the answer that some groups got. Alternatively, one group got the answer by one of the group noticing while flipping through a MAYAN dictionary (EGAD!!!) that "hun kal" is the Mayan word for 'twenty' and jumped to the conclusion that the answer was '20'. [Zowie, what a coincidence!] But it turned out that the real answer was from a totally different means, based on my knowledge as an astronomer. The tactic that I hoped people would use was to reason, 'ok, so there is no Hun Kal on Earth, so let me look on the planets--ah, and here on a map of Mercury is a prominent crater named "Hun Kal" and its longitude is 20 degrees'. Gad, sometimes you just can't lead people astray.

I will be handing out individual clues to individuals. Each clue will give part of a sentence that describes where the coin is already hidden. In some cases, the one extra word in the clued sentence will give perhaps significant constraints on the coin's location. The 14 clues together will give four sentences that pinpoint the coin's location.

I expect that many people will spend 0-4 minutes solving their own clue, then look to a friend or neighbor to share clues. By sharing with fewer people, your own chances of making the discovery are improved since fewer people are in on it. But sharing with more people will increase your clue base. So it will be a fine juggling act to minimally share clues until some point where you think you have enough to start doing a search in the public areas of Russ' house and beat out other people. (The coin is hidden in one of Russ' living room, dining room, or kitchen.) I expect that the winner will be the person who puts together 3-6 clues and makes a keen guess and starts searching in the right area. I also expect that this will all happen fast. So I'l distribute clues at 9PM sharp, regardless of whether games are going on, and it might be best to just anticipate a short break in regular games at 9:00 to ~9:05. The winner will get to keep the coin, which is a neat one I picked up in my travels.