Hunting Mysteries at MIT

If you're the sort of person who likes brain-teasers involving Caesar ciphers and cartoon rabbits, MIT is probably the school day for you.

If you were looking for someone to put jointly some really difficult puzzles, Massachusetts Institute of Technology students would be a pretty choice. They probably wouldn't need much cajoling either, as p.a. they pit their wits against each other in the MIT Mystery Hunt. In Issue 284 of The Escapist Jason Tocci talks nigh his experiences with the Mystery Hunt, and how his knowledge of Christopher Lloyd movies finally came into its possess.

When the golf links on the site finally went live, we stone-broke into groups and hit the ground operative. One group assembled Lego tableaus to satisfy the requirements of a scavenger track dow. Another group left campus entirely for a puzzle, driving off to Harvard to act on a lead in some way attached to maps and computer architecture. Most of us launched into any one of a identification number of puzzles delivered via the Web.

I wandered all over to a teammate who was stuck on her own puzzle, titled "Cluesome." She'd already made some progress with others on the team, who had wandered off in frustration much like I merely had. Their dumbfound offered a serial publication of text string section, the like "WYVMLZZVYWSBTYVVMAVWWPHUV." My teammates had made some move on, at to the lowest degree, crucial that each string was a cryptogram encoded with a simple Caesar cipher. Shift for each one letter of the above gibberish seven letters down the alphabet, and you finish with "PROFESSOR PLUM," "ROOFTOP," and "PIANO." It seemed be a clear a reference book to Clue, but that's about atomic number 3 far A anyone got. Every string was similar that: shifted some number of letters down the first principle, simply referring to unfamiliar slay scenes and weapons.

Something affected me as long-familiar about that routine, though, and inspiration smitten. Wasn't that how Christopher Lloyd killed somebody in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I started shrieking quotes from the movie, and another mate, reserved in some another mystify, looked up to call out: "He played Professor Plum in the movie translation of Cue!"

Tocci describes the joy of competing, even though he didn't recollect that his team would actually win. You can read more about the Mystery Hunt in his clause, "Hunting for Mysteries."

https://www.escapistmagazine.com/hunting-mysteries-at-mit/

Source: https://www.escapistmagazine.com/hunting-mysteries-at-mit/

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