Caltech Students, Alumni Win The Hardest Puzzle Hunt

In the early hours of Monday morning, January 16, a group of sleep-deprived puzzle solvers were summoned to play a game of Red Light, Green Light. A projector displayed colors on the wall. When the light flashed green, the solvers ran across the room; when it turned red, they stopped. But then the light turned blue.

“We had no idea what that meant,” says Kayton Truong, a third-year physics major at Caltech. “We just had to keep throwing guesses at it. Eventually we figured out you were supposed to hop across the floor on one foot.”

This zany exercise came at the end of the annual MIT Mystery Hunt, a 48-hour marathon of nonstop brainteasers that constitutes the world’s hardest puzzle hunt—and Truong and his team were just about to win it.

Every January, the MIT Mystery Hunt draws thousands of puzzle enthusiasts from around the world. This year, nearly 4,500 people comprising 250 teams competed to solve the Mystery Hunt: a story told through 152 exceedingly complicated puzzles. The puzzle hunt is created by the winning team from the previous year and traditionally includes puzzles, games, and a scavenger hunt. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the MIT Mystery Hunt has shifted to a hybrid format, with puzzles solved via an online themed website and the scavenger hunt and some optional elements in person.

During the long Martin Luther King Jr. Day weekend, a cohort of around 30 Caltech undergraduates, four graduate students, and several alumni embarked on an adventure to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to put their skills to the test. They competed as part of a larger team of around 150 members called “The Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team Formerly Known as the Team to Be Named Later,” or Team to Be Named Later (TTBNL) for short.

The challenges they faced ranged from logic puzzles to wordplay riddles, but in the MIT Mystery Hunt, nothing is straightforward. Most puzzles are home-brewed formats that rarely come with instructions. To further complicate things, the first rounds of puzzles have answers that become the source of next-level “meta” puzzles, whose answers lead to an even deeper “meta meta.” The ultimate solution serves as a clue to the physical location of a coin hidden on MIT’s campus, and the first team to find the coin wins.

Winning the hunt offers no monetary reward. Instead, victors win bragging rights and the opportunity to create next year’s Mystery Hunt—if you can call that a prize. “Nobody really wants to win because writing the next year’s hunt is a lot of work,” Truong says. “But I guess this year, we felt a spark and decided to ‘pick up the coin.'”

Jia Yue Wu, a third-year computer science major and president of Caltech’s Puzzle Club, has participated in the MIT Mystery Hunt since her first year at Caltech.

“The puzzle hunt community is amazing. It’s so diverse, and everyone is welcoming and willing to teach you anything,” Wu says. “There are members of our team who are professors, CEOs, and the dude who invented geocaching. They love seeing ‘new blood,’ so they love us Caltech undergrads.”

Team to Be Named Later started in 2018 after members of Caltech’s Puzzle Club were approached by then-postdoctoral scholar Charles Steinhardt. “Charles and his group of very strong puzzle-solver friends were MIT Mystery Hunt veterans,” says Bella Guo (BS ’17), former Puzzle Club president and nine-time Mystery Hunt participant. “They wanted to form a new team that was more focused on teaching new solvers.”

Because the MIT Mystery Hunt is so complex, it can be challenging for teams with less experience or fewer members to solve enough puzzles to make progress. Team to Be Named Later incorporated new and experienced solvers, providing Caltech students an opportunity to learn and compete. It became the unofficial Caltech team but remained open for anyone to join. “We wanted to let other folks know that if they needed a team, they could always come hunt with us,” Guo says.

To coordinate between in-person and virtually participating members, Team to Be Named Later built its own website that integrated puzzles through Google Sheets and facilitated communication via a Discord server. Team members who went to Massachusetts rented a hotel conference room where they set up tables to collaborate on individual puzzles, and solvers worked around the clock in shifts.

“If you wanted to work on a puzzle, you could go to table seven for example, and the people already there could explain what they knew to you,” Wu says. “The in-person aspect helped because we could do something like print a puzzle out, cut it apart, reassemble it, and look at it in different ways. It also made things way more fun.”

“The runaround is sort of your victory lap, this grand hurrah,” Wu says. “All the previous answers unlock activities in the runaround. You get to see every piece fall into place”
— JIA YUE WU
Solvers worked together to crack codes, translate foreign languages, complete challenging math problems, and even identify pop culture references. Wu says one of her favorite puzzles this year was based on the video game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, where solvers had to identify counterfeit paintings like the ones in the game. Guo’s favorite puzzle involved translating homonyms in non-English languages, finding patterns in the answers, and then extracting information from those patterns.

Team to Be Named Later managed to take the lead around 3 a.m. on Monday. After solving several dozen puzzles and meta puzzles, they made it to the “runaround,” the scavenger hunt in which the winning team searches for the coin on MIT’s campus.

“The runaround is sort of your victory lap, this grand hurrah,” Wu says. “All the previous answers unlock activities in the runaround. You get to see every piece fall into place.”

As the sun rose on a new day, Team to Be Named Later completed its final trials, which included the unusual game of Red Light, Green Light, and unlocked a hidden puzzle box with the MIT Mystery Hunt coin inside. “Seeing the endgame of Mystery Hunt was one of the most exciting parts,” Guo says. After six years of competing, TTBNL had achieved its first victory.

Following the closing ceremony and celebrations, Caltech students returned to Pasadena, and other TTBNL members returned to their daily lives. Guo works as a video game developer for Wizards of the Coast, writing code and developing the language known as Phyrexian for Magic: The Gathering Arena. When she’s not working, Guo will be supporting Team to Be Named Later as one of the editors in chief for next year’s MIT Mystery Hunt. Truong and Wu are also joining the effort, at least as far as their busy lives will allow.

“Caltech undergrads have laid low because we don’t exactly have 15 hours per week to dedicate to this,” Truong says. “We did decide on a theme, but I can’t reveal too much because it’s supposed to be a secret. You’ll just have to wait and see.”