The MIT Mystery Hunt

We, the faculty of the MIT Enigmatology department (Course 19), would like to welcome you to your first year of study in the department. We hope you will find this the most rewarding, the most fulfilling, the most enjoyable, and, above all, the fastest four years of study you have ever experienced.

• This welcome letter
• Your freshman year schedule
• Your first set of "courses" (puzzles)
• Your junior Project research topic

Your goal in this year's hunt is to become the first group of MIT students (even if you're not technically an MIT student, you are this weekend) ever to receive an official honorary degree in Enigmatology.

Here are the departmental requirements:

You will be taking four "years" of courses. The freshman year begins now. Luckily for you, since this is MIT, all Freshman year classes are given on a Pass/NR ("no record") basis, so you can't flunk out just yet. Even if you have not completed a year or years, you may still receive courses for following years at these times:

• Sophomore year: 12:01 AM Saturday
• Junior year: 12:01 PM Saturday
• Senior year: 12:01 AM Sunday

In order to proceed to a new year ahead of the above schedule, you must present your answer to the Faculty and defend it by means of an oral examination.

Upon completion of all degree requirements, you will be presented with an official honorary diploma in Enigmatology, which, when seal is affixed, will designate conferral of the degree.

In addition to this, there are a few special events planned:

The Spring Break Party will be held at 11:00 PM this evening (Friday, duh) in the mazzanine room of the Student Center. This party is pot luck, so everyone who comes must bring a food item. Each team should coordinate things so that its members bring items from the four major food groups: nonalcoholic drinks, desserts, chips and dips, and fruit. You are all encouraged to attend, meet your classmates, and relax a bit. There will be no puzzle-related information at the party, so just come and enjoy yourselves!

A special mandatory lecture in Enigmatology will be held at 1:00 PM on Saturday in room 6-120. The guest lecturer will be John Chaneski, a freelance puzzle constructor, renowned Enigmatologist, and, for reasons which are not likely to be clear at this moment, Chainsaw.

A wrap-up explanation, anecdote and post-mortem session will be held after the hunt. If the hunt is finished, we will hold the meeting at 1:00 PM Sunday, otherwise, check our WWW site for further information.

The Junior project:

In this packet, you will find an index card bearing a single word: Your Junior Project assignment. Your project is to construct a puzzle which will be used during the junior year of the hunt. The word you have been given is the ANSWER to the puzzle you will write. DO NOT SHOW THIS WORD TO ANYONE NOT ON YOUR TEAM!

Puzzles should be written neatly, preferably not not necessarily word-processed, and in Xerox-ready form. Include a full solution with your puzzle. In addition, please provide a trio of successively more significant hints that can be used with your puzzle. Puzzles must be turned in to us by 10:30 PM tonight. Lateness will not be tolerated.

In creating your puzzle, please adhere to the following guidelines: Your puzzle should fit on a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. If it does not, your team is responsible for providing sufficient copies of your puzzle for all teams involved in the Hunt. (For example, if you wish us to put the puzzle up on a WWW page, that's fine—just give us a disk with all necessary files on it, or e-mail us with the HTML code.) Please follow our format with an appropriate course number, title, and professor(s). Puzzles should be of intermediate to advanced difficulty, but should not be based on ultra-specific or obscure knowledge from one field of study (i.e. your (non-Enigmatology) major.) Remember, the most important things about puzzles is that they are fun. You do not need to provide directions with your puzzle—sometimes finding the directions is the puzzle itself—but directions must be included with the solution.

During the junior year, you will receive a copy of all the puzzles created by all the teams. Once you have solved at least 75% of the puzzles, and at least one team has solved your puzzle, you will have successfully completed the project, and will receive important information that will allow you to decode the answers to the junior year puzzles and get the junior year answer.

Once you have completed the junior project, you must rank the other teams' puzzles in order of preference, giving a 1 to your favorite puzzle, a 2 to your next favorite, and so on. The results of these rankings will determine when teams (including your team, of course) will receive an important hint during the senior year. Thus, it behooves you to write a puzzle which the other teams will enjoy as much as possible.

The Faculty of the Enigmatology department reserves the right to edit the submissions as much as we feel necessary before publication, but don't count on it.

How to Contact the Faculty

Office: 2-136 until 5 PM Friday, 5-133 afterwards
Daytime phone: 258-0279 after 5 PM Friday
Nighttime phone: 258-0279
Email: puzzle@mit.edu
Office Hours: pretty much all the time, except for during the Spring Break party and the Special Lecture

A good way to contact us is to come up and knock on our door...then, we have to deal with your. Otherwise, the telephone is probably best. E-mail may not be answered right away. If you have a fax machine, good for you.

You will want to have Web access. For one thing, you should be checking the web site web.mit.edu/puzzle regularly, since that's where we plan to post corrections, hints, and other important information. For anothe rthing... Well, let's just say that you definitely want to have Web access throughout the Hunt.

One member from each team should send an e-mail message with the word "subscribe" in the message body (not the header) to puzzle-announce-request@ctp.mit.edu
This will add you to the mailing list that we may use to make important announcements, such as what to do if our web site has crashed.

Faculty members:

Associate Fellows:

Professor Emeritus:

Will Shortz

Archivist's note: Will received the first real Enigmatology degree from Indiana University in 1974 under a design-your-own-major program, and is probably credited here only as the inspiration for this hunt. Also, Course 19 is doesn't actually exist at MIT. It used to be for Meteorology, but after the 1983-1984 school year was folded into Course 12, Earth Sciences. By the time of this hunt, it had already become a part of MIT lore that Course 19 was used to describe hacking in the MIT sense, pranks and practical jokes and stunts like decorating the Great Dome, but the hunt authors borrowed it to describe solving puzzles.

Freshman Survival Guide

Never been to a Hunt before? Here are a few tips and guidelines you might find handy:

The purpose of the MIT Mystery Hunt, first and foremost, is to have fun. Do not do anything which would cause you or your fellow classmates to stop having fun. That is:

• Do not hack a puzzle. That basically means no cheating. You should not try to steal the answer, either from us, from a password-protected account, or from other teams.
• Do not make a puzzle unsolvable for other teams. If we find a puzzle has become impossible due to some act of vandalism, we will release the answer for everyone. Thus, it hurts you (who actually solved the puzzle) and helps the other teams.

If at any time, you find yourself not having fun, stop whatever it is that you're doing, call us, and we'll see what we can do. The only prize for winning (other than having to run this behemoth next year, if you can call that a prize) is the satisfaction of the hunt, so don't deprive other teams of that satisfaction.

As a related note: if you find an error or inaccuracy in a puzzle, please let us know about it immediately. Do not keep this information secret. Remember that you would, of course, want to know about any errors as quickly as possible.

Answer confirmation is available, by phone or e-mail. We will happily confirm the final answer to any course (puzzle), but will not be happy to confirm partial answers. Also, if you call us too often with incorrect guesses, you will go on academic probation (we will stop answering your phone calls.)

Our hint policy: we have a hint policy. Call us if you desperately need a hint, but don't call us right after you got the puzzle, or we will mock you.

Every puzzle (with a few exceptions) can be solved and the coin may be retrieved at any time during the day or night. If you are about to retrieve the coin, please let a Faculty member know, so we can follow you and take pictures or heckle you, as the case may be. The Faculty of the Enigmatology department prides itself on its deviousness and trickery (our Tenure process is a bitch.) There may be information hidden anywhere, at any time.

Keep your eyes open—any piece of data you find may be useful. Or it may be nothing. That's for us to know and you to figure out. Pbpbpbt!

Note: There will be NO information available at the Spring Break party. We willnot answer questions, provide hints, or discuss past, present, or future courses. And there are NO hints hidden by anyone anywhere in the room, especially not in the punch bowl. Keep your septic little hands out of the punchbowl. We're drinking this stuff! Where were you raised, in a barn?

The wrap-up meeting is one ofthe most enjoyable parts of the hunt. Even if you didn't finish, or if you dropped out early, you should come and join us for the fun.

Archivist's note: This is the earliest known written record corresponding to the health and safety notices and no-cheating notices which are now a standard part of the introduction to every hunt (though 1994's introduction does remind solvers to have fun.)