The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzlehunt competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It is one of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world and attracts roughly 120 teams and 3,000 contestants (with about 2,000 on campus) annually in teams of 5 to 150 people. It has inspired similar competitions at Microsoft, Stanford University,[1] Melbourne University,[2] University of South Carolina, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and University of Aveiro (Portugal) as well as in the Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio metropolitan areas.[3][4] Because the puzzle solutions often require knowledge of esoteric and eclectic topics, the hunt is sometimes used to exemplify popular stereotypes of MIT students.[5][6]
The hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, when the teams assemble to receive the first puzzles. It concludes with a puzzle-guided journey (a "runaround") to find a "coin" hidden on MIT's campus. Each puzzlehunt is created and organized by the winning team of the previous year, which can lead to substantial differences in the rules and structure. While early hunts involved a few dozen linear puzzles, recent hunts have increased in complexity, some involving as many as 250 distinct puzzles arranged in rounds, hidden rounds, and metapuzzles. Recent hunts have also revolved around themes introduced as a skit by organizers at the opening ceremony.
^"Stanford Puzzle Hunt". SUMO. Retrieved 19 January 2014.
^"Melbourne University Mathematics and Statistics Society: Puzzle Hunt". Retrieved 2013-06-04.
^"MIT IAP Mystery Hunt Puzzle Page: Related Links". MIT Mystery Hunt. Retrieved 2007-09-04.
^Miliard, Mike (January 14, 2005). "Flex your head". Boston Phoenix. Archived from the original on September 30, 2007. Retrieved 2007-01-17.
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