MIT Mystery Hunt 2026 Postmortem
So MITMH2026 just happened. We (ET Phone in Answer) befriended some Puzzmon, but didn’t manage to close the portals. Oh well. Now, unlike lumia who decided to spend a big chunk of the writeup about girl-kissing, I’ll focus mostly on puzzles. Besides, I’m more of a cuddler than a kisser.
There will be spoilers. Click to reveal them.
Kingdom
Gen Nu Brain Rot
I didn’t really look at this one, but what a puzzle.
Mechanical Soft Diet
A puzzle based on the digits of $π$, the digits of $e$, and the digits of $π + e$. A pretty cool idea. My main contribution here was to write some code that extracted the digits corresponding to letters (as opposed to ?s) in the expansion.
Balancing Act
Well now you have a bunch of crossword clues with other crossword clues in brackets. For example, “a number [this or _] [negative modal [part of speech signifying action] spelled as one word] be written as an [a natural number, or its negative] [word often preceded by ‘L+’]” (except with better clues). But this is a Hunt puzzle, not a simple crossword puzzle, so the clues have been split arbitrarily and scrambled. We had a fun time putting them back together.
Crafts Materials
An interesting puzzle involving various crafts. Including origami!
This puzzle had 8 crafting instructions you have to parse and execute to figure out what object they make.
- Beads. I looked at it, didn’t quite understand the last part, and someone else eventually did it
- Popsicle Sticks I. So apparently we didn’t have popsicle sticks, so I had to improvise and use cardboard instead. They eventually make a suspension bridge. String was also needed, but I just imagined the string.
- Popsicle Sticks II. This one uses 30 popsicle sticks, and I didn’t feel like improvising that many, so I just drew it out. It looked like some kind of basket, but that didn’t fit alphabetically, and it took a while for me to realize it was a cradle.
- Perler Beads. Someone else did this one
- Pipe Cleaner. I did this in FreeCAD. You have to shift the lines around some because the description is very much not unique, but eventually you get a jigsaw piece. (no picture; I didn’t save it)
- Sewing. I attempted this one and failed to interpret the “the 90° turn” part, thinking there were two of them. Well, turns out, you affix the pom-pom after sewing those edges together, and then it makes sense. (Some other people also tackled this one). Also, this object turned out to be very hard to recognize.
- Parallelograms Galore. Looked complicated; someone else did it
- Origami. Nice. A pattern developed from a bird base.
Thankfully, we extracted the answer eventually.
System of Operations
A pun on “operating system” and, well, operations in mathematics. The first equation establishes a version numbering system in Android, Debian, MacOS, and Ubuntu
(those versions are “1”, and later versions are simply numbered numerically),
while the others just make you have to figure out silly things like what happens when you take an eclair and
it with a rex. (You get a leopard, apparently.). Funny puzzle indeed.
Data Revisualization
So, we looked at this, and I noticed that the second plot is trying to be an xy plot, so I xy plotted it and got the letter r. For a while, this was the only letter we got. While stuck on this puzzle, we had some cursed graph discussions, courtesy of Linus.
With a hint, and someone’s clever move to not interpolate the histogram reinterpreted as a stacked area chart, we got unstuck. By the way, first we earned a b.
Then based on the absolute ridiculousness of the puzzle and the fact that the answer is probably 4 letters long, I called in bruh (it didn’t work).
Method to the Mathmess
!! favorite puzzle alert !!
Yeah, I got very excited about this one. Have you ever wanted to calculate \(\bigseven_0^e\ e\ deye\)? (It turns out to be \(02f e^f\).) Or calculate \(\displaystyle{\bigcomma_{ζ\nabla0}^e ζ}\)? (well, it’s \(02xde<e503\). Yep, apparently the big comma operator produces propositions.) Or say this classic limerick?:
The big-seven eight to the x y eight
From zero to the fth root of f
d the cosine
Of f dot twenty-nine
Nabla log of the fth root of sigma.
(a.k.a. \(\bigseven_0^{\sqrt[f]{f}} 8^x y8\ d\cos f\cdot 29\ \nabla\ln \sqrt[f]{\textrm{Σ}}\))
Well, this puzzle takes your favorite math symbols and scrambles them up, resulting in such nonsense-looking equations, my favorite. We quickly solved it. By the way, I wrote a cursed math puzzle in 2023 for Puzzler’s Club Secret Solver. (Perhaps I should turn A Functional(?) Puzzle Hunt into an actual hunt with more than one puzzle sometime.)
Computation
A puzzle about Easter that turned out to be a nice break in a sea of hard puzzles. We came across a site that just happened to have the Orthodox Easter Julian calendar
calculation we need, with interesting variable names like first_resurrection and creation_of_world and vruceleto.
Electrical Circuit
Well, that’s more like a logical circuit than an electrical circuit, but whatever. I implemented the logical circuit in Google Sheets, then got massively red-herringed by the fact that there are 7 inputs and 10 outputs, which could be the inverse of a 7-digit display. (It was not, in fact, the inverse of a 7-digit display. The function just doesn’t work like that.) Other people realized that the inputs had to do with a quote and solved it.
Now for the dimensions. Well, uh, you see, we didn’t manage to close the portals, so, uh, they kind of affected my blog post. I somehow managed to regain control fix things. However, the portals are still there, and can be reactivated with the accessibility toggle buttons.
Land of No Name
SPLIT!
A nice Bananagrams puzzle. We needed most letters to solve it, and then when I decided to take another look at it, someone else had already solved it. Whatever.
Imaginary Factorizations
Someone figured out the enumeration with only like 3 letters unlocked, and then I wrote code to factor all the prime numbers over \(\mathbb{Z}[\sqrt{-1}]\). After that, we noticed that all the numbers contain a component with at most 4 digits and one with at least 5 digits, but then got stuck forever. Oh well.
ASCII
A puzzle with no letters in it except the title and some x’s at the bottom. Someone else figured out that each line of symbols is supposed to wrap around and make a rectangle, forming some ASCII image. Then I put a few pieces together and recognized the shape of Alaska. Eventually though, other people solved this puzzle.
MIT Mosaic Lab
A puzzle with no letters in it except the title and the word “Example”. But speaking of the example…
Media! Lab! Media! Lab!
I got pretty excited about seeing the Media Lab logo. Now, I’m not a Media Lab researcher, but
last year, I took a class called How to Make (Almost) Anything, and that was one of my favorite classes. It happened in
the 6th floor of E14, the Media Lab building. The building itself looks enticing from the inside (especially floors below 5), and there’s Media Lab-like logos for the various
groups that work in the Media Lab. After making this realization, there was a bit of tension between people who wanted to fully solve the logic puzzles and make sure their
solutions were unique, and people who wanted to just solve enough to figure out what Media Lab group logo it’s depicting (me).
This was our first solve in the Land of No Names. When we solved it, we joyfully announced “We got a J!”. Everyone rejoiced, perhaps just in jest, or truly jolly. People adjusted to the hijinks of this joust, subjecting themselves to a journey of letters being adjoined in frequency order. What jerks! In fact, just the perfect jab at Cardinality exists, but this object is a Japanese word: ijiwaru!
(thankfully, we did get M as our third letter)
Mass Confusion
I didn’t do this one, but I heard people solve it, and let’s just say: “WHY MASSACHUSETTS PEOPLE, WHY?” (they say, currently living in Massachusetts)
Not a QR Code
The design rules were figureable from the letters we had at the time, but then we got stuck writing code. Turns out Reed-Solomon wasn’t the solution. Oh well.
Almost
A fun fact about this puzzle, containing almost-pangrams, is that if you unlock a letter, and there’s a line it doesn’t appear in, then that line’s missing letter is the letter you just unlocked. Someone else figured this out and cheesed a few lines. Also, I love that “the quick brown ox jumps over the lazy dog” shows up. Move out the way, foxes, it’s the ox’s time to jump!
MIT Dropquotes
When Banandy was adding puzzles to the team’s spreadsheet from Land of No Name, they added this puzzle as one of the early ones (by 4-digit code, of course) with something like “this is a test, please don’t actually attempt this puzzle, it’s dropquotes”
Eventually we got enough letters to make a serious attempt at this puzzle, but when I looked at it, for some reason I initially started trying to read it right-to-left. (Probably just got tricked by the vertical arrangement of letters at the top of a dropquote. Whatever.)
HidAtoZ
Figuring out the rules was pretty tricky without enough letters, though the z’s were pretty helpful. We attempted to solve the first Hidato with less letters than we probably should attempt it with, and surprisingly succeeded. Then we attempted the next one, and failed due to lack of uniqueness.
Meta: The Alphabet
This looked like a 25/26-answers-required meta (or 24/26 if you’re really stretching it) until someone figured out that you can write a linear equation system where the variables are lengths of the expansions of each letter, which would mean that at 24/26 letters there’d be only 12 variables (and 26 equations). However, the target lengths aren’t in order, so things get more complicated.
At the time, we couldn’t render graphics (we were missing GL). Linus solved the more complicated system and backsolved those last 2 puzzles. From there, we got stuck on extraction until hinted twice.
Hyperbolic Space
Had
"""""",,..
We had worked on this puzzle, but wow, parsing that 9th clue is hard. Let me just say, that this is such a funny puzzle. Not only is it a logic puzzle (of the Einstein kind), but also a parsing puzzle. (It was eventually solved.)
Multidimensional Crossword
A cool idea. You think it’s three-dimensional (which is already unusual), but based on some clues it’s actually four-dimensional, with time being the fourth dimension. We didn’t get that far on this one (just filling in some clues, fitting a few emoji, and figuring out how the grid works). However, I’m disappointed that in the top-down view that down doesn’t point into the screen, and that in the front view, into doesn’t point into the screen.
Setting Boundaries
Cute puzzle. One of my favorite tricks (mentioned by Brian) is the boundary trick: because each of the two components must be orthogonally connected, if you have
cells A, B, A in cyclic order on the boundary (where A and B are are puzzle types), then all boundary cells between the two As on the arc that doesn’t contain B
must also be A. The extraction was also pretty cool.
Stray Child
Cool, a Japanese puzzle! I filled out quite a lot of the clues, but some of them were too long (and no shorter word made sense). Then someone else realized that there’s 7 spots in the crossword that are weird, corresponding to the 7 length-3 blanks. Filling those in with kanji and searching the results gives MyGO!! songs with tricky-to-read names. Once we got to the final extraction, though, we got stuck. When we finally realized what we were supposed to do there, we let out a collective groan.
Meta: Hyperbolic Space
Time to tile hyperbolic space! Someone else worked on backsolving the rest of the puzzles while we tiled a diagram. And let me tell you, navigating a big tessellation in hyperbolic space is hard. But we did it anyway.
Well, some of us did. After backsolving enough puzzles, we unlocked Fate’s Thread Casino, which distracted a lot of people. Thankfully, some of us resisted the temptation and continued to work on Hyperbolic Space.
And then came the actual meta. You’re telling me that not only is there this 24-heptagon structure that can tile the hyperbolic plane, but that it has cubes in it?! (And anticubes! Don’t get distracted!) I was the one to figure out what those cubes were, and it was especially tricky when we didn’t copy letters from one part of the diagram to the other. I did find a nice way to find the point opposite of another point in a cube. (walk, left, walk, left, walk, right, walk, left, walk, left, walk)
Atlas of Mosaics
Bite-sized Logic
I only worked on the takoyaki, but this was such a funny idea. Let’s eat some puzzles!
The Case of the Superhero Dinner Party
Favorite puzzle!… is what I probably would have said if I didn’t miss out on working on this puzzle. An investigation made out of hexagon tiles? Awesome.
On the Fence
Time to solve hexagonal slitherlinks with the worst logic-puzzle-solving interface I’ve encountered. Oof. I managed to get the final extraction on this one though.
The Tortured Programmer’s Department
An esoteric programming language puzzle. Awesome! Someone else recognized the programming language (Hexagony) and somehow solved a puzzle (T?? O??????) without recognizing the Taylor Swift reference. (They thought the inputs were whole words and that the program just outputs its input). Then I realized the reference and saw how much sense it made, then tried to solve MIRRORBALL thinking the goal was to make an infinite loop (hey, infinite loops are represented by infinite mirror bouncing, so…). Then I got sniped (turns out, the goal is to reverse the input). But then I solved I FORGOT THAT YOU EXISTED. Nice. But yeah, it’s called Hexagony for a reason. Let’s not program in that ever again.
Welp, that’s all I have for now. By the way, I have some interesting puzzle ideas for some future Mystery Hunt.