Much of my weekend: The MIT Mystery Hunt is a yearly giant weekend puzzle race that has well over a thousand participants. Get a taste here – this year’s was “easier”, in that a team solved it Sunday evening, almost 53 hours after the hunt began. If you know the answers to this or this one (both quite graphics-oriented!), let me know, I got nowhere with them. Yes, that’s all the information you get, and your goal is to find a word or phrase somehow hidden in what you see. Using a supercomputer is entirely fine. I kept saying “Enhance!” but it didn’t help.

There are many other amusing puzzles to poke at in this year’s collection, such as massive tiled sudokus and flag color pie charts. Give it a look, it’s fun to see the sheer scope and warped brilliance of some of these.

I was able to help our “small” team of 35+ to solve the last part of one cool puzzle (sadly, the link to it is dead!) by using three.js. The puzzle itself is fun, it was a few-hour-long solve for me, then some time writing a three.js program to help find the solution. If you want to fast forward, find the final hidden word if you can… (I couldn’t – a teammate did; I’m an OK puzzler, but sometimes forget the maxim, “look again, and again.” And, looking back on it four years later, I can’t seen the word now!)