The joyful, perplexing world of puzzle hunts

Welcome to the strange, deviously difficult and incredibly joyful world of puzzle hunts. Follow along as Alex Rosenthal lifts the veil on one of the world's most complex puzzle hunts, the MIT Mystery Hunt -- and reveals how puzzles can be found in the most unexpected places. (Hint: see if you can spot the puzzle hidden in this TED Talk.)

It's 4am, you've been awake
for forty hours,

when you unlock a puzzle
containing this video

of some kind of dance-off between
a chicken and a roller-skating beaver.

(Laughter)

The confusion and delight
you're experiencing

is a typical moment
at the MIT Mystery Hunt,

which is basically the Olympics
meets Burning Man

for a specific type of nerd.

(Laughter)

Today, I'm going to take you
inside this strange,

intellectually masochistic
and incredibly joyful world.

But first, I have to explain
what I mean when I say "puzzle."

A puzzle-hunt-style puzzle is a data set.

It can be a grid of letters,
a sudoku, a video, an audio --

it can be anything
that contains hidden information

that can eventually resolve into an answer
that is a word or a phrase.

So, to give you an example,

this is a puzzle called "Master Pieces."

It consists of 10 images of LEGO people
looking at piles of LEGOs.

And to save us some time,
I'm going to explain what's going on here.

Each of the piles of LEGOs
is a deconstructed work of art

in the style of a famous artist.

So, does anybody recognize
the artist on the left?

They used a lot of red.

I heard "Rothko," yeah.

The second one?

(Audience) Mondrian.

Alex Rosenthal: Yeah, well done.

And the third one?
This is the hardest one --

Yeah, Klimt, I heard it.

Well done, the color
is the biggest clue there.

So the puzzle has various clues

that tell you what matters
here are the artists,

not the specific works of art.

And what you need to do
is then look at what you haven't used yet,

which is the number of LEGO people
in each painting.

And you can count them

and then count into the artists'
last names by the same number of letters.

So there's three people
in front of the Rothko on the left,

so you take the third
letter, which is a T.

There's only one in front of the Mondrian,
so you take the first letter, M.

And there's three again in front of Klimt,
so you take the third letter, I.

You do that for all 10
of the original artists

and put them in the order,

and you get the answer,
which is "illuminate."

(Laughter)

Puzzles like this
are about communicating an idea.

But where I'm trying to be
as clear as possible for you now,

puzzles have to navigate the line
between abstraction and clarity.

They have to be obtuse enough
to make you work for it,

but elegant enough
so you can get to the aha moment,

where everything clicks into place.

Puzzle solvers are junkies
for this aha moment --

it feels like a brief high
and an instant of pristine clarity.

And there's also a deeper
fulfillment at play here,

which is that humans
are innate problem-solvers.

That's why we love crosswords
and escape rooms

and figuring out how to explore
the bottom of the ocean.

Solving deviously difficult puzzles
expands our minds in new directions,

and it also helps us come at problems
from diverse perspectives.

These puzzles come
in various puzzle hunts,

which come in various shapes and sizes.

There's one-hour ones
designed for novices,

24-hour road rallies,

and the puzzle hunt of puzzle hunts,
the MIT Mystery Hunt.

This is an event
that takes place once a year

and has around 2,000 people
descending on MIT's campus

and solving puzzles in teams that range
from a single person to over 100.

My team has 60 people on it --

that includes a national crossword
puzzle tournament champion,

a particle physicist, a composer,

an actual deep-sea explorer,

and me, feeling like
"Mr. Bean goes to Bletchley Park."

(Laughter)

That's actually an apt comparison,
because one year involved a puzzle

where you had to construct
a working Enigma machine

out of pieces of cardboard.

(Laughter)

Each Mystery Hunt has a theme.

Past ones have included "The Matrix"
and "Alice in Wonderland."

It's often pop culture-
and literary-based themes.

And the goal is to find the coin

that's been hidden somewhere
on MIT's campus.

And in order to get there,
you have to solve around 150 puzzles

and do various events and challenges.

I had done this for about 10 years
without ever dreaming of winning,

until January of 2016,

where 53 hours into a hunt
whose theme is the movie "Inception,"

we haven't slept in days,
so everything is hilarious ...

(Laughter)

The tables are covered in piles of papers,
of our notes and completed puzzles.

The whiteboards are an unintelligible mess
of three days' worth of insights.

And we're stuck on two puzzles.

If we could crack them,
we would get into the endgame,

and after hours of work,
in a magical moment,

they both fall within
10 seconds of each other,

and soon, we're on the final runaround,

a series of clues
that will lead us to the coin,

and we're racing through the halls of MIT,

trying not to knock over
or terrify tour groups,

when we realize we're not alone,

there's another team
on the runaround as well,

and we don't know who's ahead.

So, we're a mess of anxiety,

anticipation, exhilaration
and sleep deprivation,

when we arrive at the Alchemist,

a sculpture in which we find ...

this coin.

(Cheers)

Yeah.

(Applause)

And in claiming it,
we win the MIT Mystery Hunt

by a tiny margin of five minutes.

What I didn't mention before

is that the prize for winning

is that you get to construct
the whole hunt for the following year.

(Laughter)

The punishment for winning

is that you have to construct
the whole hunt for the following year.

At the beginning of 2016,
I had never constructed a puzzle before --

I had solved plenty of puzzles,

but constructing and solving
are entirely different beasts.

But once again,

I was lucky to be on a team full
of brilliant mentors and collaborators.

So, from a constructor's point of view,

a puzzle is where I have an idea,

and instead of telling you what it is,

I'm going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs
so you can figure it out for yourself,

and have the joy and experience
of the aha moment.

This is another way of looking
at the aha moment.

And what's incredible to me
is that this experience,

which is very emotional
and kind of almost physical,

is something that can be
carefully designed.

So, to show you what I mean,

this is a puzzle I co-constructed
with my friend Matt Gruskin.

It's a text adventure,

which is the old-school
adventure game format,

where you're exploring,
going north, east, south and west,

picking up items and using them.

And you could get
to the end of the game part,

but you won't have solved the puzzle.

In order to do so, you have to recognize
a hidden layer of information,

and the easiest way of seeing it
is by mapping the game out.

That looks something like this.

Does anybody recognize what this is?

Yeah, exactly.

This text adventure takes place
within "Settlers of Catan."

Who here knows what "Settlers" is?

Nerds.

(Laughter)

If you don't know,
"Settlers" is a board game

where you're competing
against other people

to collect resources
and use them to build structures.

And within the text adventure,
we hid information in various ways,

with which you could
reconstruct an entire game.

You could figure out the roads,
the cities, the towns,

the resources, the numbers on the tiles,
even the dice rolls.

You put all that information together
and you could extract an answer

in a way that's too complicated
to explain right now.

(Laughter)

But find me afterwards
if you really want to know.

(Laughter)

But what this puzzle emphasized for me

is the value of perspective shifts
in inspiring an aha.

So, in this puzzle,

you go from experiencing the world
on the ground, as a character,

to looking down on it from above
as if you're playing a board game,

and in that shift,

you completely reframe
all the information you've been given.

The hardest part of construction for me
is coming up with a great idea for an aha.

Fortunately, the world
is a torrent of ideas and information.

I've seen fantastic puzzles constructed
out of the waggle dances of bees,

and the remarkable coincidence
that the 88 keys of a piano

can be perfectly mapped
to the 88 constellations in the sky.

Once you find that out,
you can't not construct the puzzle,

and it's going to be
about having the solvers

make that connection in their own minds.

Whether you give them stars on a keyboard

or play the celestial music of the cosmos,

you're getting them there,
one way or another.

Before long, you find yourself
staring at a turtle,

and asking yourself, "Is this a puzzle?"

(Laughter)

And also, staring at a turtle and saying,

"I never appreciated what multitudes
this contains in its shell alone."

This might be
a familiar experience to you,

if you've ever been watching a TED Talk
and asked yourself, "Is this a puzzle?"

(Laughter)

I'm not telling.

But what I will say

is that puzzles can be found
in the most unexpected of places.

That brings us back to one
of my favorite puzzles of all time,

which was constructed by Trip Payne.

And this time, I'm going to
play it for you with the sound on,

so get ready to name that tune.

(Slowed-down mock clucking)

(Slowed-down mock clucking)

(Slowed-down mock clucking)

(Laughter)

Who knows what that is?

Yeah, "You Make Me Feel
Like a Natural Woman."

(Laughter)

So you can identify that
and seven other songs and clips,

and then look at the videos
themselves for clues,

where the way that they are filmed
and edited together

plus things like the cutaways
to the panel of five people

sitting at a table,

which is reminiscent of a panel of judges,

all of this can suggest
"reality competition show."

And either through internet research,

or from just recognizing this,
you can get to the aha,

which is that these clips
are shot-for-shot recreations

of lip-synch battles
from "RuPaul's Drag Race."

(Laughter)

So, why do we do this?

(Laughter)

(Applause)

You tell me, I don't know.

So, first of all, it's really fun.

But I think it also improves
our lives in various ways.

Being able to solve puzzles,
when I'm confronted with a challenge,

has allowed me to explore it
from multiple perspectives

before I lock in an approach.

Also, the process of solving
is great training for working with a team,

knowing when to listen, when to share,

and how to recognize and celebrate insight

and being able to construct ahas
is a very powerful tool.

Think of how powerful and exciting
and convincing an idea is

that comes from your own mind,

where you make
all the connections yourself.

So in January of 2017,

after tens of thousands of hours of work,

we finally run our Mystery Hunt.

And it's a different sort of satisfaction
than the quick high of an aha moment.

Instead, it's the slow burn of saying
something through perplexing abstraction,

yet being understood.

And when it was all over,

in our exhaustion, we turned to each other
and the world, and we said,

"We're never doing this again.
It's too much work.

It's really fun, but no more winning."

One year later, in January of 2018,

we won the MIT Mystery Hunt again.

(Laughter)

So, we're currently I don't know how many
tens of thousands of hours of work in,

and we're two months out
from the 2019 Hunt.

So, thank you for listening,
I have to go write a puzzle.

(Laughter)

(Applause)