Thoughts on MITMH 2024

…From Somebody Vastly Underqualified to Have Participated in MITMH 2024

Quick links: My Experience / Conclusions / Puzzles I Solved / Puzzles I Didn’t Solve

Recently, I participated as a remote solo solver in MIT Mystery Hunt for the first time! It’s an event I’ve had some vague degree of awareness of for several years now, but only became more closely aware of after becoming more involved in the puzzling community last year, so this year was the first opportunity I’ve had to participate in it and actually have a decent chance of achieving greater-than-zero progress.

On the off-chance you’ve made it to my blog without being a puzzler yourself, a quick introduction: MIT Mystery Hunt (MITMH) is an annual puzzle hunt, an event consisting of numerous ‘hunt-style’ puzzles (forgive the tautology) – that is, puzzles with unusual, varied, and sometimes cryptic mechanics, which typically end up giving a word or phrase as an answer. There also exist metapuzzles, which often act as capstones to individual rounds, and take the answers from previous puzzles as inputs to another puzzle to give a new answer, and there even exist metametapuzzles (whose definition I trust you can extrapolate yourself). MITMH is the largest and most well-known puzzle hunt, with its puzzles often being significantly harder than those in other hunts, and it is very much designed to be solved by teams – I believe the winning teams typically have somewhere on the order of 50 or so members.

…So as I was saying, I participated as a solo solver. Not the most advisable decision, but that’s what happens when (a) one only decides at the last minute to participate in the hunt, and (b) one is too socially anxious to join a team of mostly strangers. I’ll have some thoughts later in this piece regarding the solo vs team dynamic and whether I regret my choice, but I wanted to mention it here at the start because it’s some rather important context to have.

There seemingly exists a tradition among participants of writing post-hunt recaps; typically this is done by more competent solvers than me, but I thought that perhaps there might be at least a little novelty in reading what the MITMH experience is like for a complete novice, since it’s a perspective I haven’t seen shared much. I’m certainly not posting this with the expectation that future hunt-writers ‘fix’ the things I found less than ideal – I’m not the target audience for an event like this, and that’s okay. Any complaints or criticisms I make might best be considered as frustration with myself rather than frustration with the hunt; although I did enjoy the hunt, it was a little sad knowing that if I were just a little better at puzzles, I could have enjoyed it even more. Next year, I suppose!

Finally, please note there will be unmarked spoilers for MITMH 2024 in this post, mostly because I’m writing this on a whim and if I stop to find a spoiler plugin for WordPress I’ll end up just not writing it at all.

My Experience of the Hunt

I wasn’t really too sure what to expect going into the hunt, other than that I should be prepared for the possibility of making very little progress and giving up; I told myself I’d be happy if I managed to solve even one puzzle, since I’d seen some MITMH puzzles before and knew they could be pretty impenetrable for beginners. The event’s opening ceremony actually worked out to be at a comfortable early-afternoon time for the UK, so I was able to tune in live, and it was a lot of fun! The ceremony introduced the theme of the hunt: this year, solvers were astrophysicists attempting to escape the Underworld, to which we had been consigned as punishment for demoting Pluto from dwarf planet to ‘unimportant space debris’. The hosting team’s enthusiasm and sense of humour was clearly visible in the opening ceremony, and it did a lot to get me excited to jump in and start participating, so kudos to them for that!

The start of the hunt proper was delayed by an hour or so due to web server issues, but eventually, the puzzles unlocked and I found myself staring at my first MITMH puzzles. The initial width of the hunt was quite small – I had only one round accessible to me (The Throne Room), with only six puzzles unlocked. This felt like it would be a promising start, since it would prevent me from fracturing my focus too much and working on too many different puzzles at once – however, in reality, it turned out that all of the puzzles I had available to me were above my skill level. I managed to make some decent progress on Corporate Change and Deep Conspiracy, but in the end I went to bed not having solved a puzzle yet, which did feel a little bad even if it was what I had expected.

Fortunately, several time unlocks happened while I was asleep, so I woke up to two entire rounds of new puzzles! The Underworld Court is, I think, the round that immediately follows The Throne Room, so I had expected its puzzles to be even harder – but there were also far more of them available to me, so maybe I would be able to find something suited for me. The other new round, The Hole in the Ceiling of Hades, was explicitly called out as being full of easier puzzles, so this also seemed promising.

I set about investigating the new puzzles, intending to dedicate my entire day to them. As expected, even a lot of the easier ones seemed beyond me, but it was at least an entertaining experience to just witness the sheer number of puzzles now available to me and slowly comb through them to try to find something, however small, to find a foothold with. My efforts paid off: at around 17:00 on Saturday, just under 24 hours after the hunt’s commencement, I finally solved my first puzzle, Cubo. It felt fantastic! …to an extent. It was a very straightforward puzzle, so I hadn’t yet had that experience of solving a puzzle that’s truly deranged in that way that the best MITMH puzzles are, and I was also frustrated with myself for having solved it much slower than I ought to have done (I genuinely lost about twenty minutes at one point solely due to miscopying some information from Wikipedia and failing to realise; there was a lot of room for optimisation in my solve). All the same, it did feel good to have finally achieved my goal of at least doing something during the hunt.

It also gave me a boost of confidence to keep going: ‘okay, maybe I can only solve the ‘simple’ puzzles, but I am at least capable of that much’. I felt invigorated, especially since another time unlock had given me two new puzzles – who knew, perhaps I would blaze through them in an instant! Yeah, no, actually this was the point where I encountered Why The Romans Never Invented Logic Puzzles (a puzzle whose title gives you a pretty good idea of what it’s likely to involve, enough to inspire dread) and hit a massive wall. This was a puzzle that was, again, quite straightforward, but required a lot of slow, laborious effort, and so it absorbed quite a lot of my time before I eventually solved it.

Most of the rest of the hunt proceeded in this manner for me: I would encounter a puzzle that I knew was within my capabilities but which would take a lot of time, I would slowly work on it, and I would eventually solved it, having skipped over some of the more interesting puzzles in the meantime. By the official end of the hunt, I had solved seven puzzles – far far short of the over 200 contained in the entire event, of course, but also a fair bit higher than the modest target of 1 I had set for myself.

Conclusions

If I sound somewhat negative in my descriptions so far, it is only in retrospect; at the time, I had a great deal of fun participating in the hunt, and finished it feeling reasonably satisfied. It is only on analysis that I realise I probably could and should have been able to get more out of the event, and certainly there are some useful takeaways from this experience that I will bear in mind for next year. Foremost of these is that I would benefit from being more strategic in when and how I tackle puzzles: MITMH is designed for large teams, and thus is designed to be parallelisable. As a solo solver, I should be doing as much as I can to mitigate the loss of that parallelisation; if I encounter a puzzle which seems straightforward but slow, I should save that for the downtime between ‘aha’ moments on more difficult puzzles, giving my mind time to work on those harder puzzles in the background, rather than tackling the straightforward puzzle immediately just because it’s easier.

Another takeaway just in terms of my own personal enjoyment of the hunt is that I should have been less afraid to look into later puzzles. I had anticipated that the hunt’s difficulty would rise more or less monotonically as time went on, but I actually found that puzzle difficulty was much more varied than I had anticipated, both within rounds and over the course of the hunt. Part of the reason I wanted to finally try a Mystery Hunt was because I wanted to have that experience of seeing those truly bizarre puzzles that one gets in a hunt’s later stages, and I think I missed out on that opportunity because of a misprioritisation of which puzzles to complete. Certainly I would have been gated in any case by my lack of round unlocks, but even within the puzzles I had available to me, I skipped some puzzles that could have been quite interesting (Do You Like Wordle? and Roguelikes with a K come to mind) but which seemed too intimidating for me. In reality, even if I had been unable to complete them, I probably still would have had fun! (I recognise that this is in direct contradiction to my statement in the previous paragraph that I should be more strategic in choosing puzzles I am capable of… I don’t really have a way to resolve that contradiction, I think there’s just an inherent dichotomy as a solo solver between prioritising fun and prioritising achievement, and it’s natural to be torn between wanting both.)

One slight disappointment which I don’t think is fully on me is that, as somebody who wasn’t progressing through the hunt at the ‘intended’ pace (this is one of the few things in this post that is likely applicable to some actual teams as well as just solo solvers, incidentally), I felt a little lost as to my place within the hunt and within the unlock structure. I’m given to understand that solve/unlock notifications were disabled due to an issue with websockets when the hunt was being run, which is entirely reasonable and my sympathy goes out to the tech team; had that issue not popped up, I can imagine the hunt structure might have been clearer to me. In lieu of notifications, emails were sent out regarding time unlocks, and this was helpful, but I still struggled to get an idea of the ‘bigger picture’ of the hunt. It might have been nice to have some sort of summary page where I could track my progress through the hunt and see things like ‘[X] round was time-unlocked at [Y] time’ or ‘Puzzle [A] was unlocked due to completing [N] puzzles in round [B]’ all together in one place – this isn’t something I’ve seen any hunt do, to be clear, and it might well be very tricky to implement, but if there were ever a hunt that would benefit from it then I think MITMH is it.

In a similar vein, past the kickoff, I felt entirely disconnected from the story of the hunt (which is a shame, because I heard it was good!); there was a story page, but it was in my opinion a little hidden out of the way, and it again suffered from me not progressing through the hunt as intended. I had story sections unlocked for some of the overworld rounds, without having actually completed the rounds that would ordinarily have unlocked them, and so as a result I was missing a big chunk of plot in the middle. I don’t know that there’s really a way around this, unfortunately; while making the hunt structure clearer to slow teams might be achievable, filling in the gaps in the story for these teams without spoiling beats that they might unlock properly later is probably just be too much work to ask of the hunt writers. As aforementioned, I must remember at the end of the day that this hunt was not designed for me, and so sometimes there’s just going to be awkward stuff like that which doesn’t quite work right for a solo solver or slow team.

Puzzles I Solved

Puzzles I Didn’t Solve But Enjoyed