Wed, 07 Nov 2007
Music puzzles
When I explain to people what the MIT Mystery Hunt is, I usually give this example from 2004:
You are faced with a web page whose title is "Track 13" and that embeds an MP3 file. The file is aobut 30 seconds long, and it seems to be two-second snippets from about 15 songs. So you get a bunch of people together, and you identify the songs. Once you write out the track titles, they look something like this:
Order by New Era Rapid Fire by The Pixies Delirium of Disorder by Bad Religion Eggcellent Epiphanies by The Choo-Choo Train Raindrops Fallin' On My Head by Ozzy Osbourne Later On by Bruce Willis Your Mom Is Amazing by Your Mom Reconstruction of the Fables by They Might Be Giants Interesting People by Cute Is What We Aim For Crazy by R.E.M. Consistent by R.E.M. Licking Lips by Ray Charles I'm Not Your Grand-Pa by Your Grand-Pa Ponies Rule by Aqua Teen Hunger Force Sock It To 'Em by The Low-Flying Kites Bacon, Bacon, Bacon by Interpol You'd Never Believe Me by Blink 182 Raccoon Tail by Mario Amaze Me by Girlyman Nathan's Rise by Mozart Katholic Kookies by Kristian At Heart
That is, the first column spells out "ORDER LYRIC CLIPS BY RANK". So now you have to figure out the lyric clips that you've been hearing, which takes even more collaboration and Googling, and once you do, you stare at it, trying to figure out an order until someone comes by and says, "Hey, Rolling Stone just released their top songs list this year." So you order it by that and you get the name of some band, followed by "NOT DON".
As luck has it, everyone in that band (according to All Music Guide) had the letters "DON" in their name, except for one guy. So you call in his last name as the answer, and you move on. We did all this in the Bio Lab of ESG.
In the 2007 hunt, we had a new music puzzle! We began to work on it in the Bio Lab of ESG! But when I asked if anyone remembered "Track 13" or worked on it, they all had blank faces.
Maybe the explanation is not that I'm old. After all, there are veterans on the team who have been there since I joined them. But it struck me as evidence of a generation boundary, which saddened me, especially in my last year at Hopkins where most of my good friends had already graduated.
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