I'm not sure why I had my heart set on going to MIT as a kid. Even once I was accepted and started drawing up possible course schedules, I was drawn to the idea of majoring in economics, which means that it probably wouldn't have changed my life that much, since it was economics that led me into law. I settled for the full scholarship to Brandeis and buying a now-long-gone sweatshirt with the MIT Press-logo. Anyway, Katie Newmark writes about the MIT-Caltech prank wars. Which reminds me about the spectacular Mystery Hunts students put on.

What made this hunt so hard? Puzzles like the 192-letter cryptogram, for one thing. As Jean notes, "A cipher of that length should be a snap to break. And this one wouldn't have been bad at all if I'd thought to mention that the hidden message was in Spanish. But I didn't. I also neglected to note that the pairs 'll', 'rr,' and 'ch' stood for single letters, as they do in the Spanish alphabet."

Also:

"My biggest problem was making the things hard enough. Once I wrote a clue in Minoan Linear B, a totally obscure language that was used on clay tablets in ancient Crete. To make things tougher, I didn't tell them it was Linear B and I checked out the two library books on the subject. All the teams solved it anyway! One team had a person who was actually studying Linear B. Another just happened to have a book on the subject. It was incredible."

And

I entered my first Mystery Hunt in 1983, and the first puzzle that caught my eye was this: "One of the activities listed in this month's guide is a fake. Receive a vital clue at its ersatz meeting." That sounded pretty easy, so I began paging through the guide. I had forgotten I was at MIT. With real listings such as "How to Change the Color of Lightning" and "The Universe, With Three Examples," I was completely unable to deduce that the perfectly reasonable-sounding "Parrots Around the World" was a Brad Schaefer invention. It turned out I was not alone in failing to see through this subterfuge; several bird-lovers showed up only to receive the baffling advice "Switch the answers to subclues two and seven."

Actual Hunts through History. This blogger did a scaled-down version for his birthday party that seems like it would've been more my speed. I'm enjoying reading his gaming posts.