Mystery Hunt 2023 Team Statistics

2023 January 24

With MIT Mystery Hunt 2023 (list of puzzles, kickoff video, wrap up video, global stats) coming to close yesterday – apparently the second-longest MIT mystery hunt – I wanted to look back at the puzzle solving on my team I’m not a planet either. While mystery hunt was back to being in person after having been online for two years, about half of the team was remote, and we retained the fully remote tech stack for team communication and coordination.

As I did last year and the year before, I was on the tech team and so recorded our puzzle solving statistics. Mercifully, the tech worked quite smoothly this year: automated puzzle scraping was up within 40 minutes of hunt start, and there were no significant hiccups¹the worst was a few minutes delay in making slack channels when some puzzles with no latin characters in their title tripped the automated system.

First, how many puzzles were available to our team, and how many of them had been solved at any time:

Like all images here, click to zoom. Note that this includes event puzzles. The diurnal cycle in puzzle solving is evident, as is the several big timed unlocks of puzzles

Below is the list of every puzzle solved by the team. In total we gained access to 93 puzzles, of which we solved 35.

Click a heading to sort by that column:

Time unlocked is how long after hunt start each puzzle became available.
Time to solve is how much later we solved the puzzle after it became available.
Time spent solving is the total amount of time people spent in the puzzle’s comingle room before it was solved. Note that any time spent before 2.30pm on Friday is undercounted by a factor of 3²because at first Ceres was checking for updates every 3 minutes, which was later increased to every minute; in practice this means only the first 3 Atrium puzzles.
Solved by is the number of teams to solve this puzzle
Median solve time is the median time to solve among teams that solved it
Skipped by is the number of teams that opened the solution without having solved it

Puzzle	Round	Time unlocked	Time to solve	Time spent solving	Solved by	Median solve time	Skipped by
H2No	Science	4h 32m	37m 2s	6h 42m	130	2h 25m	11
Natural Transformation	Science	5h 9m	47m 3s	8h 44m	120	1h 51m	14
People Watching	Atrium	2h 10m	1h 8m	7h 53m	149	5h 17m	22
One of the Puzzles of All Time	Science	3h 19m	1h 12m	10h 37m	116	5h 9m	21
You’re Telling Me	Atrium	0s	1h 13m	2h 22m	208	3h 18m	3
Scicabulary	Science	25h 25m	1h 17m	5h 10m	131	3h 25m	18
Museum Rules	Atrium	0s	2h 10m	6h 8m	189	5h 26m	6
Inscription	Atrium	0s	2h 13m	4h 7m	190	5h 28m	15
This Puzzle is Just Another …	Basement	49h 42m	3h 49m	10h 38m	67	3h 15m	7
Interpretive Art	Art	31h 2m	4h 2m	13h 24m	84	7h 36m	31
Extrasensory	Science	25h 25m	6h 5m	4h 5m	101	6h 13m	27
The Cafe	Atrium	29h 52m	6h 33m	38h 22m	107	2h 53m	0
A Twisted Theory	Natural History	25h 25m	6h 59m	5h 46m	92	23h 31m	46
Collage	Art	31h 2m	7h 39m	9h 19m	126	5h 0m	20
Quandle	Office	49h 42m	8h 6m	3h 3m	80	3h 16m	5
Hall of Archaeology	Natural History	25h 25m	8h 21m	4h 33m	146	6h 23m	6
Some Assembly Required	The Factory Floor	6h 50m	8h 39m	16h 49m	77	28h 23m	59
Nuclear Words	Science	39h 11m	9h 59m	31h 8m	72	5h 0m	0
World’s Smallest Logic Puzzles	Science	2h 42m	11h 6m	24h 56m	113	9h 1m	33
Subterranean Secrets	Basement	49h 42m	11h 8m	15h 50m	55	12h 56m	32
🐍	Basement	43h 29m	11h 52m	14h 49m	52	7h 35m	10
Brain Freeze	Science	25h 25m	13h 45m	16h 58m	108	10h 8m	28
Dropypasta	Atrium	13h 48m	14h 3m	30h 51m	142	5h 25m	29
Reflective Screen	Office	49h 42m	15h 39m	6h 46m	33	10h 11m	21
Diagramless	Office	49h 42m	18h 35m	1h 16m	61	4h 25m	9
Bridge Building	Science	25h 25m	18h 38m	18h 52m	104	14h 32m	37
Kubernetes	World History	31h 2m	21h 52m	6h 24m	90	8h 36m	25
Street Smarts	Atrium	2h 13m	22h 9m	47h 12m	147	19h 12m	98
Quality Assurance	The Factory Floor	6h 48m	23h 40m	62h 13m	96	28h 29m	22
Baking Bread	The Factory Floor	6h 48m	25h 33m	40h 38m	81	18h 19m	25
Friends Event	Events	0s	26h 18m	3m 0s	0	0s	0
Art Event	Events	0s	26h 30m	8m 0s	0	0s	0
Cafe Event	Events	0s	26h 30m	0s	0	0s	0
Dance Event	Events	0s	29h 48m	3m 0s	0	0s	0
Apples Plus Bananas	Atrium	1h 13m	30h 21m	16h 6m	159	18h 22m	17

Note that later puzzles were solved by fewer, better teams, and thus the median solve times go down relative to their difficulty.

Quality Assurance had by far the most person-time invested, at 62h, with the two metas The Cafe and Nuclear Words also being quite high. A list of all unsolved puzzles in which we invested at least 3 hours of time:

Solve for Ewe (39h 27m)
Shortcuts (33h 8m)
Formula Deluxe (28h 11m)
Catenaverbozoa (27h 1m)
Direct Translation (17h 10m)
Showcase (15h 9m)
Gears (15h 1m)
Much Ado About Nothing (13h 45m)
Think Fast (13h 34m)
Exhibit of Colors (12h 45m)
Bundles (9h 11m)
G|R|E|A|T W|H|A|L|E S|O|N|G (8h 54m)
A Trip to the Museum (7h 44m)
Fine Dining (7h 30m)
Tissues (6h 36m)
Cute Cats (6h 11m)
Alloy of Words (5h 2m)
Draw Wings (4h 14m)
Overloaded (4h 10m)
Too Many Secrets (3h 27m)
Art of the game.such.fame! (3h 19m)

Though note that much of time spent on Much Ado About Nothing was actually finding the entrance to the Puzzle Factory, including a collaborative jigsaw puzzle; I didn’t notice people spending much time on the puzzle itself.

Unlike in previous years which had quite a few easier puzzles that we solved quickly, this year the distribution of solve times was somewhat flat:

Conversely, though, the slowest puzzle took us only 30 hours, whereas in the past there were puzzles that took the whole weekend to complete (cough Voltage Controlled).

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