19.2837 — Transformative Linguistics Solution

Archivist's Note: No solution was provided for this puzzle and I'm not sure teams would even have been able to find some of these obscure and MIT-centric references at the time of the hunt. I wrote out the parts I could.

1. No idea. This butter machine was referenced on an LSC page from Fall 1994, but the link isn't there and is not in the Wayback machine.
   
2. Fred the Dorm is East Campus, and second floor east parallel's mascot was Beast from the East, so we change the first letter of whatever we have to a B.
   
3. E10 no longer exists, but in December 1997 it housed the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy. That's course 24. The book is by Pepper White. So we change an X to a W.
4. No idea about the beaver's name, unless it's MIT's mascot Tim the Beaver and the letter is M. Backsolving suggests it's a D.
   
5. DS9's shape-shifter was named Odo, so we remove the O or D.
6. Reverse the order of the letters. Whatever they are.
7. Sondheim's shows on Broadway:
   1. West Side Story (1957)
   2. Gypsy (1959)
   3. A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962)
   4. Anyone Can Whistle (1964)
   5. Do I Hear a Waltz? (1965)
   6. Company (1970)
   7. Follies (1971)
   8. A Little Night Music (1973)
   9. Pacific Overtures (1976)
   10. Sweeney Todd (1979)
   11. Merrily We Roll Along (1981)
   12. Sunday in the Park with George (1984)
   13. Into the Woods (1987)
   14. Passion (1994)
       
   Not on Broadway:
   • Saturday Night (wasn't produced at all until 1997, and then never on Broadway)
     
   • Evening Primrose (for television)
   • The Frogs (didn't reach Broadway until 2004, so not at the time of this hunt)
   • Assassins (didn't reach Broadway until 2004, so not at the time of this hunt)
   • Road Show (not written until after this hunt; never reached Broadway)
   This doesn't work. We multiply 14 by 2 and add 3 to get 31, and we're supposed to remove a letter corresponding to that. I assume they didn't count West Side Story, Gypsy, and Do I Hear a Waltz?, for which others wrote the music and Sondheim wrote the lyrics. If you exclude those the answer is 11, the math gives 25, and we remove a Y.
   
8. The Bloomsday book is Ulysses, so we change whatever the vowel is to E.
   

The metapuzzle solution tells us the answer is supposed to be WEB, but we can only partially reverse the steps. Before step 8 we would have had an A, I, or U instead of the E. (Not O, because step 5 would have removed it.) Before step 7 there was also a Y in it and before step 6 it was reversed, so something like BAWY. Before step 5 there was also a D and it could have spelled BAWDY. In step 4 we changed the fourth letter (to a D, if BAWDY is correct) but we don't know what it was before. In step 3 we changed the X to a W, and in step 2 we changed the first letter to a B (again matching BAWDY), but we don't know what it was before. If BAWDY is correct, we started with ?AX?Y.

But the answer is WEB.