Crazy Overthinking Ingenious Nerds (aka, “The MIT Mystery Hunt”)

Next week (on Friday, January 15), one of the most famous puzzle hunts of all time begins anew – the MIT Mystery Hunt! I would try to do justice to this story, but an article in Games Magazine sums it up far better than I could …

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology seems to have been designed for treasure hunts. Its main buildings, constructed in the early part of this century, are interconnected in a bewildering maze of passages, skywalks, and tunnels. Halls suddenly slope, or change direction, or stop, hinting at some architectural compromise now long-forgotten. Harshly-lit basements lurk beneath, with dingy subbasements below them. Even the doors are peculiar. Some are half-size. Some lead nowhere. Some bear inscriptions such as “Department of Alchemy” or “Shelob’s Lair.”

Each January, during the students’ “Independent Activities Period,” an unusual coin is hidden somewhere on campus. Students form teams and spend countless hours solving a host of baffling puzzles in order to track the coin down. To succeed, they may have to determine the duty cycle of an electronic circuit, clamber through a humid steam tunnel, bone up on their crystallography, and break into an elevator control room. Their only prize: to run the hunt the following year.

Credit all this to one Brad Schaefer.

Brad was a graduate student at the Institute back in 1979. An avid puzzle person, he would become well-known for organizing a role-playing game called Spymaster and for recreating famous chess games in the lobby of MIT’s main building using a life-size board and human pieces. His most long-lived contribution, however, has been the invention of the Mystery Hunt.

The idea of a university-wide puzzle activity came to Brad while he was driving cross-country with his girlfriend (and occasional White Queen in the living chess games) Martha. The first Mystery Hunt took place a few months later, in January of 1980. Brad stood in the main lobby of MIT and handed out a set of difficult puzzles whose solution disclosed the location of a hidden Indian head penny. it was the beginning of a new MIT tradition.

Brad’s hunt was not for lightweights. For starters, teams had to translate a Chinese ideogram, evaluate a complex integral, determine the result of a convoluted FORTRAN program, and break a polyalphabetic cipher. Nevertheless, several groups breezed through the hunt, and the coin was found the same day. Brad was to find that the hunts were always solved more quickly than he expected.

“My biggest problem was making the things hard enough. Once I wrote a clue in Minoan Linear B, a totally obscure language that was used on clay tablets in ancient Crete. To make things tougher, I didn’t tell them it was Linear B and I checked out the two library books on the subject. All the teams solved it anyway! One team had a person who was actually studying Linear B. Another just happened to have a book on the subject. It was incredible.”

Jean-Joseph Cotè remembers Brad’s killer puzzles with affection. Jean was an undergraduate at the time and leader of a team called the Holman Reactionary Army.

“We were trying to translate this passage in Bengali, and one of our guys was sitting in the library with a Bengali-English dictionary. Unfortunately, he didn’t know the order of the Bengali alphabet, and the letters get joined in weird ways. He actually got a few words but then we realized there was going to be a meeting of the Indian students’ organization. Three of us got there early and we stood at the door asking each new person, ‘Excuse me, do you speak Bengali?’ We finally found someone who did!”

A slipup by Brad lead Jean into one of the more infamous episodes in Mystery Huntdom. “He’d asked us for the star catalog number of the nearest globular cluster to Cor Caroli and the answer was M3. We were supposed to figure out to drop the M and use the 3 to make the library room number 132. But Brad didn’t realize there’s a mezzanine in that building, so there really is a room 1M32! We raced there and knocked on the door, and there’s this shuffling inside and someone’s holding the doorknob. We went around the back and through a window we could see another team ransacking the office! We found the librarian whose office it was, and she kicked them out. Then she let us search, but it was the wrong place after all.”

Brad ran Mystery Hunts for four years until he got his PhD in 1983. The Holman Reactionary Army found the penny that year (it was taped to the bottom of a drawer full of fossilized worms) and thereby “won” the opportunity to put on the next hunt.

People who were expecting a letdown in intensity once Jean took over for Brad got a rude shock when they received the “Ofishal Mystery Hunt Clue Sheet” in January of 1984. its cheery subheading was “Good luck, folks,” and teams would need every bit of encouragement they could get during the 57 hour and 25 minutes of what was to be the longest hunt on record.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram, for one thing. As Jean notes, “A cipher of that length should be a snap to break. And this one wouldn’t have been bad at all if I’d thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I didn’t. I also neglected to note that the pairs ‘ll’, ‘rr,’ and ‘ch’ stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet.” Chalk up some frustrated victims for this ruse, particularly the people on the Spanish House team, who were among the last to figure out the trick.

Other problems required research into bartending, rock music, topology, and Massachusetts town history. Despite all this a team did eventually find the coin on the third day. They were informed that they had to run the next hunt, and MIT’s newest tradition was solidly on its way.