Poster: zandperl

The Countdown is Begun!

The MIT Mystery Hunt officially begins on Friday January 13, 2006, in just under 42 days from now. tacotortoise will hopefully be soon registering our team and reserving us two rooms - the plan is to try and get two adjacent rooms so that we can use one for solving and one for sleeping. (Last year a number of the more freakish of us felt we were losing too much time by doing things like going home and showering.)

If you are able to join the team right from the kickoff around noon on Friday Jan 13, that'd be awesome, but if you have to work then please do trickle in as soon after as possible. We normally start off with a few puzzles to work on Friday afternoon and can't access any others until those are solved, so the pace will pick up after we've unlocked a few additional puzzles.

We're still looking for someone to set up a password-locked set of web-based chat rooms, and a password-locked wiki, both so that we can communicate results between local and remote people. We had great team work with a few remote groups last year, but we're looking to improve it even more, especially for those who have to work remotely as individuals rather than groups.

Poster: zandperl

Here's a list of useful links for solving puzzles from last year's webpage. The list will be updated and have something done with it to make it more visible from this front page.

• MIT Mystery Hunt Homepage


• General




• Google and Google Images


• Librarian's Index to the Internet (link coming soon)


• The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) - Movie, TV, and Actor reference


• Allmusic - Music reference


• Wikipedia - Everything reference


• Amazon.com - Sometimes you can search inside books; search by ISBN.


• Project Gutenberg - A repository of public-domain literature online.  Helpful if you need to download some famous work to have a computer program munch it up in some manner.




• Dictionaries




• Merriam-Webster - High quality (and one of our team members works for them)


• Dictionary.com - pulls entries from several online sources, including Merriam-Webster.


• NPL Word Lists - download any of the word lists used by the NPL Dictionary Search.  Definitions not included.




• Puzzle Resources




• Babelfish - translator


• Internet Anagram Server - Generates multi-word anagrams of up to 20 or so letters.  The advanced generator allows you to add restrictions to the anagrams.


• One Across - Crossword clue solver.  Straightforward to use, but maybe not as good as NPL dictionary search.


• NPL Dictionary Search - Nathan's choice


• NPL Base Finder - You can search a wide variety of comprehensive word lists in many useful ways.  If you know a little bit about regexps, you can find
  almost anything -- fill in missing letters in a word, solve a single-word cryptogram, do a single-word anagram with unknown letters...


• NPL Reference Sources - A list (much like this one) of potentially useful links for solving puzzles.  Some overlap with this list, but much more than I'd care to repeat.




• Puzzle How-To's




• Web Sudoku - Sudoku is the latest craze in puzzling. Created in Japan and imported to the Colonies from England, it's a logic puzzle that uses the numbers 1 through 9 as symbols (no math involved).
  
• Paint-by-Numbers - no, it's not Watercoloring for Dummies, it's a pictorial logic puzzle.


• Cryptic crosswords


• Cross sums


• Crostics


• Dropquotes




• Maps




• Google Maps / Google Earth (link coming soon)


• Yahoo! Maps and Driving Directions


• Mapquest


• Terraserver - Microsoft-run (but still good) satellite imagery (pre-Y2K) and some topological maps

Poster: zandperl (Andria)

Announcing the official launching of the Lake Effect Snow blog! This is our second year competing as a team for in the MIT Mystery Hunt. If you've never heard of it, it's a geek's wet dream: a puzzle-solving extravaganza and treasure hunt all rolled into one. It has a 25-year tradition or something, but the upcoming one takes place from Friday January 13 (noon) to at most Monday January 16. Yes, that's Martin Luther King Jr. Day Weekend.

Anyone who's interested can participate, just talk w/ the team captain (listed below). As for what you can contribute, you'd be surprised what you know that no one else does, or you can make connections in information that no one else's thought of. Some of our team members take on slightly larger roles, and knowing their names/contact may prove useful in the future.

Captain: tacotortoise Nathan
On-site Communication: Belle
Remote Communication: zandperl Andria
Site Expert: Josh
Web Collaboration Creator: Armen (maybe? - we're looking for a web IRC client and a wiki, both need to be password protected.)

For now, posts will be public, but contact information, and once the fun starts all puzzle solving information, will be friends-locked, so make sure you get friended by us if you're on the team. At that time, the password for the page will also be emailed to team members to let this page help facilitate communications.