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Regex Crossword

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Re: Regex Crossword

#13

Post by jonny_eh »

matthberg wrote: post #10

I'm surprised nobody's mentioned the Regex Crossword game site [0], it's shown up on HN several times [1][2] and has a fantastic user-submitted puzzle section (that includes the MIT Mystery Hunt puzzle [3]) and a puzzle builder. 0: https://regexcrossword.com/ 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=regexcrossword.com 2: Most discussed posting: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8674039 3: https://regexcrossword.c…

> I'm surprised nobody's mentioned

There's a lot of these. An embarrassment of riches!

Re: Regex Crossword

#15

Post by teo_zero »

I loved this puzzle, spent hours to solve it.

What I don't like is the mystery hunt that follows. You don't know where to start, you don't know if the solution you found is correct, etc.

Even a after looking up the solution, it doesn't make me go "wow! That's brilliant". The final phrase is too short to be meaningful, it's not related to the game (at least, I can't get the connection), one of the words I didn't even know it existed in English (is it an abbreviation, perhaps? Is it American English?)...

Re: Regex Crossword

#17

Post by atuladhar »

frob wrote: post #5

This is a Mystery Hunt puzzle, so solving the obvious puzzle is only the first step of solving the puzzle. You will need to do something with the puzzle solution to somehow get a word or short phrase. I remember doing this one by hand over a decade ago. Fond memories. https://puzzles.mit.edu/

I also solved it by hand many years ago but I think I never realized there was another layer to it! I was pretty proud of myself when I solved it so I’m pretty sure I kept my hand-written solution somewhere — will have to dig it up again!

Re: Regex Crossword

#19

Post by schoen »

teo_zero wrote: post #15

I loved this puzzle, spent hours to solve it. What I don't like is the mystery hunt that follows. You don't know where to start, you don't know if the solution you found is correct, etc. Even a after looking up the solution, it doesn't make me go "wow! That's brilliant". The final phrase is too short to be meaningful, it's not related to the game (at least, I can't get the connection), one of the words I didn't even…

In its original context, this puzzle was part of the 2013 Mystery Hunt which was being solved in real time during a single weekend by numerous large teams (and included about 200 different puzzles, of which this was just one). Those teams were all very familiar with the convention that every puzzle must solve to a word or phrase, and that this typically requires finding the appropriate "extraction".

Teams could "call in" their proposed answers and quickly be told whether they were correct. (At that time that was done partly over the telephone; now it's normally done automatically by a web site, with some kind of rate limiting on guesses.)

There's still a question of whether a particular extraction is good or bad, whether a particular answer is thematic, and whether the answer feels contrived. But for the originally intended audience, the extraction step was fully expected.

(I was on one of the teams that solved this in 2013, and in fact we had written the 2012 Mystery Hunt which the Manic Sages won in order to win the right to organize the 2013 event.)

Here are a few links to materials that try to explain this genre of puzzle events and some of the things that people might expect and might try:

https://puzzles.mit.edu/resources.html

It's understandable that a lot of this could be confusing or seem arbitrary when solving the puzzle outside of the larger puzzlehunt context.

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