From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology IAP Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzle competition held at MIT during the January Independent Activity Period (IAP). The competition challenges each team to solve a large number of puzzles which lead to a coin hidden somewhere on-campus.
The MIT IAP Mystery Hunt is an annual tradition which has gone on since 1980. It was started by Brad Schaefer, a student at MIT who decided to organize a campus-wide puzzle competition. Brad organized the first hunt that January, and every year until he left the institute in 1983. From that point on, the team who won each hunt has taken over to create the hunt for the subsequent year. (There's a Games Magazine article which describes the history in much better detail.)
Traditionally, the hunt starts at noon some Friday of Independent Activity Period (IAP), which is typically the month of January. At the start of the hunt, all of the teams congregate in MIT Lobby 7, where the administrators explain the rules of the hunt and pass out packets. The teams then adjourn to their bases (wherever they want) and start solving puzzles. Teams can consist of any number of people, but usually contain at least a dozen participants. A trend seems to be starting where some of these members are involved remotely, using email, phone, and fax to participate with their team.
Early hunts had between 30 and 40 puzzles; in recent years, that number has increased dramatically. The 2003 hunt, the longest on record at 67 hours (!), had over 100 puzzles. These puzzles can be crosswords, anagrams, cryptograms, number puzzles, on-line puzzles, geometrical puzzles, physical challenges, mystery trails, scavenger hunts, inter-team games, or anything else that the hunt organizers can think up. The puzzles may or may not be obvious, may or may not have instructions, may or may not be solvable!
Puzzles often require knowledge of the MIT campus (usually gained during the hunt) and access to some computer facilities. Although it is not required that all participants have some sort of MIT affiliation, most teams are made up predominantly by current MIT students.
It typically takes about 48 hours of hard work for a team to solve the puzzles... with the answers to all of the puzzles coming together to lead the teams to the location of a coin hidden somewhere on the MIT campus. During this time, teams are usually allowed (and encouraged) to report their progress to the hunt organizers, to verify intermediate answers, clarify certain questions, or just to find out their ranking amongst the teams.
As mentioned above, the winner of one year's hunt wins the right to organize the following year's hunt... including the right to redefine almost any of the rules of the hunt. This tradition leads to many creative and varied hunts, but also guarantees that the same people can not be involved in creating a hunt two years running... so this hunt page will be maintained by different people over the years... beware.
