The joyful, perplexing world of puzzle hunts | Alex Rosenthal

54,958 views ・ 2019-01-16

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

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It's 4am, you've been awake for forty hours,
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when you unlock a puzzle containing this video
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of some kind of dance-off between a chicken and a roller-skating beaver.
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(Laughter)
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The confusion and delight you're experiencing
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is a typical moment at the MIT Mystery Hunt,
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which is basically the Olympics meets Burning Man
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for a specific type of nerd.
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(Laughter)
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Today, I'm going to take you inside this strange,
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intellectually masochistic and incredibly joyful world.
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But first, I have to explain what I mean when I say "puzzle."
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A puzzle-hunt-style puzzle is a data set.
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It can be a grid of letters, a sudoku, a video, an audio --
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it can be anything that contains hidden information
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that can eventually resolve into an answer that is a word or a phrase.
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So, to give you an example,
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this is a puzzle called "Master Pieces."
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It consists of 10 images of LEGO people looking at piles of LEGOs.
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And to save us some time, I'm going to explain what's going on here.
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Each of the piles of LEGOs is a deconstructed work of art
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in the style of a famous artist.
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So, does anybody recognize the artist on the left?
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They used a lot of red.
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I heard "Rothko," yeah.
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The second one?
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(Audience) Mondrian.
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Alex Rosenthal: Yeah, well done.
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And the third one? This is the hardest one --
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Yeah, Klimt, I heard it.
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Well done, the color is the biggest clue there.
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So the puzzle has various clues
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that tell you what matters here are the artists,
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not the specific works of art.
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And what you need to do is then look at what you haven't used yet,
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which is the number of LEGO people in each painting.
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And you can count them
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and then count into the artists' last names by the same number of letters.
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So there's three people in front of the Rothko on the left,
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so you take the third letter, which is a T.
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There's only one in front of the Mondrian, so you take the first letter, M.
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And there's three again in front of Klimt, so you take the third letter, I.
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You do that for all 10 of the original artists
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and put them in the order,
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and you get the answer, which is "illuminate."
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(Laughter)
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Puzzles like this are about communicating an idea.
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But where I'm trying to be as clear as possible for you now,
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puzzles have to navigate the line between abstraction and clarity.
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They have to be obtuse enough to make you work for it,
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but elegant enough so you can get to the aha moment,
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where everything clicks into place.
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Puzzle solvers are junkies for this aha moment --
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it feels like a brief high and an instant of pristine clarity.
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And there's also a deeper fulfillment at play here,
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which is that humans are innate problem-solvers.
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That's why we love crosswords and escape rooms
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and figuring out how to explore the bottom of the ocean.
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Solving deviously difficult puzzles expands our minds in new directions,
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and it also helps us come at problems from diverse perspectives.
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These puzzles come in various puzzle hunts,
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which come in various shapes and sizes.
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There's one-hour ones designed for novices,
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24-hour road rallies,
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and the puzzle hunt of puzzle hunts, the MIT Mystery Hunt.
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This is an event that takes place once a year
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and has around 2,000 people descending on MIT's campus
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and solving puzzles in teams that range from a single person to over 100.
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My team has 60 people on it --
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that includes a national crossword puzzle tournament champion,
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a particle physicist, a composer,
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an actual deep-sea explorer,
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and me, feeling like "Mr. Bean goes to Bletchley Park."
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(Laughter)
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That's actually an apt comparison, because one year involved a puzzle
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where you had to construct a working Enigma machine
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out of pieces of cardboard.
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(Laughter)
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Each Mystery Hunt has a theme.
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Past ones have included "The Matrix" and "Alice in Wonderland."
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It's often pop culture- and literary-based themes.
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And the goal is to find the coin
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that's been hidden somewhere on MIT's campus.
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And in order to get there, you have to solve around 150 puzzles
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and do various events and challenges.
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I had done this for about 10 years without ever dreaming of winning,
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until January of 2016,
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where 53 hours into a hunt whose theme is the movie "Inception,"
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we haven't slept in days, so everything is hilarious ...
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(Laughter)
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The tables are covered in piles of papers, of our notes and completed puzzles.
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The whiteboards are an unintelligible mess of three days' worth of insights.
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And we're stuck on two puzzles.
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If we could crack them, we would get into the endgame,
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and after hours of work, in a magical moment,
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they both fall within 10 seconds of each other,
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and soon, we're on the final runaround,
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a series of clues that will lead us to the coin,
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and we're racing through the halls of MIT,
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trying not to knock over or terrify tour groups,
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when we realize we're not alone,
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there's another team on the runaround as well,
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and we don't know who's ahead.
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So, we're a mess of anxiety,
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anticipation, exhilaration and sleep deprivation,
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when we arrive at the Alchemist,
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a sculpture in which we find ...
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this coin.
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(Cheers)
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Yeah.
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(Applause)
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And in claiming it, we win the MIT Mystery Hunt
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by a tiny margin of five minutes.
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What I didn't mention before
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is that the prize for winning
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is that you get to construct the whole hunt for the following year.
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(Laughter)
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The punishment for winning
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is that you have to construct the whole hunt for the following year.
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At the beginning of 2016, I had never constructed a puzzle before --
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I had solved plenty of puzzles,
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but constructing and solving are entirely different beasts.
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But once again,
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I was lucky to be on a team full of brilliant mentors and collaborators.
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So, from a constructor's point of view,
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a puzzle is where I have an idea,
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and instead of telling you what it is,
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I'm going to leave a trail of breadcrumbs so you can figure it out for yourself,
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and have the joy and experience of the aha moment.
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This is another way of looking at the aha moment.
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And what's incredible to me is that this experience,
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which is very emotional and kind of almost physical,
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is something that can be carefully designed.
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So, to show you what I mean,
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this is a puzzle I co-constructed with my friend Matt Gruskin.
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It's a text adventure,
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which is the old-school adventure game format,
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where you're exploring, going north, east, south and west,
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picking up items and using them.
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And you could get to the end of the game part,
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but you won't have solved the puzzle.
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In order to do so, you have to recognize a hidden layer of information,
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and the easiest way of seeing it is by mapping the game out.
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That looks something like this.
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Does anybody recognize what this is?
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Yeah, exactly.
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This text adventure takes place within "Settlers of Catan."
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Who here knows what "Settlers" is?
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Nerds.
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(Laughter)
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If you don't know, "Settlers" is a board game
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where you're competing against other people
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to collect resources and use them to build structures.
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And within the text adventure, we hid information in various ways,
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with which you could reconstruct an entire game.
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You could figure out the roads, the cities, the towns,
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the resources, the numbers on the tiles, even the dice rolls.
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You put all that information together and you could extract an answer
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in a way that's too complicated to explain right now.
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(Laughter)
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But find me afterwards if you really want to know.
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(Laughter)
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But what this puzzle emphasized for me
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is the value of perspective shifts in inspiring an aha.
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So, in this puzzle,
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you go from experiencing the world on the ground, as a character,
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to looking down on it from above as if you're playing a board game,
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and in that shift,
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you completely reframe all the information you've been given.
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The hardest part of construction for me is coming up with a great idea for an aha.
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Fortunately, the world is a torrent of ideas and information.
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I've seen fantastic puzzles constructed out of the waggle dances of bees,
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and the remarkable coincidence that the 88 keys of a piano
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can be perfectly mapped to the 88 constellations in the sky.
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Once you find that out, you can't not construct the puzzle,
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and it's going to be about having the solvers
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make that connection in their own minds.
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Whether you give them stars on a keyboard
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or play the celestial music of the cosmos,
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you're getting them there, one way or another.
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Before long, you find yourself staring at a turtle,
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and asking yourself, "Is this a puzzle?"
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(Laughter)
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And also, staring at a turtle and saying,
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"I never appreciated what multitudes this contains in its shell alone."
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This might be a familiar experience to you,
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if you've ever been watching a TED Talk and asked yourself, "Is this a puzzle?"
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(Laughter)
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I'm not telling.
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But what I will say
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is that puzzles can be found in the most unexpected of places.
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That brings us back to one of my favorite puzzles of all time,
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which was constructed by Trip Payne.
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And this time, I'm going to play it for you with the sound on,
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so get ready to name that tune.
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(Slowed-down mock clucking)
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(Slowed-down mock clucking)
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(Slowed-down mock clucking)
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(Laughter)
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Who knows what that is?
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Yeah, "You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman."
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(Laughter)
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So you can identify that and seven other songs and clips,
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and then look at the videos themselves for clues,
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where the way that they are filmed and edited together
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plus things like the cutaways to the panel of five people
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sitting at a table,
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which is reminiscent of a panel of judges,
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all of this can suggest "reality competition show."
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And either through internet research,
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or from just recognizing this, you can get to the aha,
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which is that these clips are shot-for-shot recreations
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of lip-synch battles from "RuPaul's Drag Race."
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(Laughter)
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So, why do we do this?
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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You tell me, I don't know.
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So, first of all, it's really fun.
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But I think it also improves our lives in various ways.
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Being able to solve puzzles, when I'm confronted with a challenge,
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has allowed me to explore it from multiple perspectives
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before I lock in an approach.
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Also, the process of solving is great training for working with a team,
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knowing when to listen, when to share,
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and how to recognize and celebrate insight
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and being able to construct ahas is a very powerful tool.
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Think of how powerful and exciting and convincing an idea is
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that comes from your own mind,
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where you make all the connections yourself.
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So in January of 2017,
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after tens of thousands of hours of work,
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we finally run our Mystery Hunt.
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And it's a different sort of satisfaction than the quick high of an aha moment.
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Instead, it's the slow burn of saying something through perplexing abstraction,
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yet being understood.
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And when it was all over,
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in our exhaustion, we turned to each other and the world, and we said,
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"We're never doing this again. It's too much work.
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It's really fun, but no more winning."
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One year later, in January of 2018,
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we won the MIT Mystery Hunt again.
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(Laughter)
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So, we're currently I don't know how many tens of thousands of hours of work in,
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and we're two months out from the 2019 Hunt.
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So, thank you for listening, I have to go write a puzzle.
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(Laughter)
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(Applause)
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