Idle MUMS thoughts

[tahnan]

The MUMS Puzzle Hunt has been over for a while now; saxikath and I were idly doing the puzzles, though not with any real serious attention. Some idle, disconnected thoughts, as I go through the answers...

Puzzle 1.5: In what sense is the bottom center picture in the first grid "Schrodinger's Cat"? It's a cat. It's not hard to show a cat in two superimposed states; whereas this is...a cat. Between two lines.

Puzzle 2.1: There's nothing more frustrating than doing the right thing, looking at your results, saying "What is that, like three Es in a row? Never mind", and then learning the answer was EEEPC. Admittedly, there was an actual metapuzzle that used all the answers, so this one was somewhat constrained, but it doesn't make me any happier about it.

Puzzle 2.2: I thought this was cute, personally. I almost jumped to the second step before getting the instructions to do so; I certainly noticed that it was there.

Puzzle 3.1: I more or less liked this puzzle; Foggy, I think, found it too unconstrained to start, but I was able to make decent progress. My main criticism, I think, is that given the (predictable) nature of the clue phrase, I was able to fill in my gaps with only roughly half the letters. I'll note here, though I noticed it even more strongly in a later puzzle: "number of popes not counting antipopes"? Meh. If you want a number to go with "Benedict", it's 16. Even the Catholic Church recognizes this, insofar as the official pope numbering of the fifteen Benedicts skips Benedict X (antipope, 1508).

Puzzle 3.3: I may just be bitter because I missed the acrostic that clues you into the answer; but I find it a little unsatisfying that the bulk of the puzzle involves an extensive logical decoding of a card-based cryptogram, which you then use to translate some other random string of cards. Once we deciphered the cryptogram, we tried all kinds of things with the resulting order of letters and with the words in the puzzle. (Including trying to decipher "IRON CHEF", which the flavortext kind of told you you were supposed to do.)

Puzzle 4.4: Kind of stupid. All right, admittedly, a major part of the problem would be that I wasn't ever going to make the connection to AFL teams, but since so many of these are ambiguous ("crew"? "pack"? "legion"?), and since I really hate collective-noun terms anyway, I'm glad I didn't put any more time into this.

Puzzle 5.2: Not necessarily the best puzzle I've seen with this theme, but basically pretty nicely done (all the more so, given the meta).

Puzzle 5.3: "The lateral step here is to guess that all teams must end up with the same score at the end of the league"—but why would you take that step? (cf Taipei.)

Meta: I'd stopped looking by this point, and given the gaps in our answers I don't know how long it would have taken us to get it, but I have to admit I really like it.

Comments

[devjoe.livejournal.com]

1.5: Ugh. This was the only one we had not identified when my team solved the puzzle, though we did not have the exact correct names on a couple others.
4.4: They always do this to us, making one puzzle depend on something purely Australian.
5.3: The flavor text notably features a cravat near the end, which is a TIE.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

re 5.3: the thing is that there were references to cravats throughout, starting in the first round, apparently because Matt Preston is a fan of them. So the mention of it isn't really all that notable.

[projectyl.livejournal.com]

My chain of reasoning went like this:

- So we have a bunch of matches; maybe there's some system for determining the winners?

- *looks at the Wikipedia article for this sort of tournament, notices the drawback that teams often have to play matches even though they have no hope of winning* I wonder if that's it - maybe the lower place teams don't bother, since they're already out?

- No, it looks like nobody's entirely out, though the best that this last place team can do is tie. And even then, they'd have to win every match, and the leading team would have to lose every match.

- Wait... maybe that's not a coincidence... *continues on from there*

[dalryaug.livejournal.com]

1.5: I wasn't able to identify that cat either, but now that you made me curious enough to look at it again, I notice those two lines are probably meant to represent the lines in a ket, which is notation commonly used in quantum mechanics to represent a quantum state. I sort of wonder if this is the idea they were going for, though I agree that if that was all then there are clearer ways of cluing that.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Oh I see. Yes, it does seem to be a ket, but I wonder how many people figured that out.