Mystery Hunt 2014 - Summing Up

This year's mystery hunt's winner is a team go by the name of "One Fish Two Fish Random Fish Blue Fish". They have manage to find the coin at 2:30 AM on Sunday, January 19, 2014.

I think this year's hunt is easier then those that I have been to. I did have fun, but one minor point, personally, I enjoy more of the hardcore logic puzzles, but this year, the initial set of puzzles does not have many of them (more are released later on, but personally I think those sets are released a little bit late).

Why do I think this year's hunt was easier? Let me speak meta-physically. It feels like most puzzles this year have 2 layers of indirection, where when you solve the first layer of the puzzle, the second layer become fairly obvious, where as last year, it feels like I have to solve 4 different layers, and have to conjoin the 4 layers using some convoluted connection to bend the layers out of shape in order to poke at the answer. The puzzles and solutions are out already, feel free to determine if it was easier or not by yourself. http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2014/

How did our team do this year?

We did pretty well, probably solved around 30 puzzles, including 3 meta puzzles. This is compared to last year, which was probably less than 10. (And the first year our team has done it, we only solved about 5).

As far as my personal goal, I was aiming for being major contributor to 2 puzzles this year, where I end up contributing to probably around 5 (including helping out on 2 of the meta). I was happy with how I did.

In terms of how much sleep I got over the weekend, probably less than 10 hours combined over the period of 3 days. Which is pretty typical for me when it comes to mystery hunt.

Here is one of my favorite puzzle from this year's hunt, see how you do on it. http://www.mit.edu/~puzzle/2014/puzzle/stage_select/