The first ever Mathcamp Puzzle Hunt began at 4 pm on Wednesday, August 7, 2002. Anticipating the inception of a Mathcamp team for the MIT Mystery Hunt next January, I wanted to run a small puzzle event that would give potential team members some experience struggling with Mystery Hunt-type problems.
Team Horseradish (Hamoon Ekhtiari, Julian Gilbey, Joseph Goodman, Dan Gulotta, Theo Johnson-Freyd, Cristin Kenney, Emir Sipahioglu, Lori Thomas) won the hunt at 6:15 pm on Thursday, August 8. The hunt took as long as it did mostly because I refused to confirm answers between midnight and 8 am, and during class time on Thursday, so effectively they finished the hunt in 13 or 14 hours of work. Congratulations, Horseradish!
Dawn breaks on what seems like a typical Saturday morning at Mathcamp. The JCs stir in the office, drinking the first glass of soymilk of the day and preparing to make a photocopy run. But when one JC walks to Olin to unlock the classrooms, a horrifying discovery is made: a grim note is taped to the blackboard in Olin 1, reading
Mwahahahaha.... I have stolen all of the chalk from Mathcamp!!! Since you have nothing to write with, you will never again be able to teach fascinating mathematics to your students --- unless, of course, you are able to uncover my identity by solving the series of fiendish puzzles that I have left for you at each of your classes today!
Panic ensues, and only worsens when Mark Sapir arrives at his Combinatorics on Words class at 9 am to discover a puzzle left on the front counter of Barnes 219. Unable to do mathematics, the staff and campers have little else to do but to try to solve the puzzles, hoping that by the end of the day the mystery will be solved....
Click here to read the rules of the hunt. For some puzzle resources, look here. The puzzles linked below are what competitors in the hunt were given. In some cases, one had to be at the Hunt for the puzzle to be solvable, and notes are included for each of these puzzles.
Extra: Scavenger Hunt
9 am classes were released at 4 pm, and subsequent sets of puzzles were released at 90 minute intervals. The Advisor Meetings puzzle was released with the 11 am set. Teams which solved three out of four puzzles in each of the four sets advanced to the Mathematical Relays endgame round. When the fourth round was released, teams were informed that they could each substitute the scavenger hunt for any one puzzle in the hunt.