MH2K7

I arranged my holiday travels, as has become my custom, to put me in Cambridge (MA) for MLK weekend and the annual MIT Mystery Hunt. Our team did a little better this year than in the last two, but still failed to break into the cluster of teams that were in the running to win. Still, it was a good chance to see old friends from MIT and to solve lots of puzzles, including:

• The Art of Succeeding — fit the names of all the monarchs of England (Alfred the Great to Anne before the Acts of Union) into a grid. Someone had made progress on this puzzle, but was stumped until jrandall and I teamed up to finish it. He created a more comprehensive list on his computer to grep for names that fit the patterns in the grid and I contributed my better-than-average knowledge of the English monarchy to fill in some of the blanks.



• Les Canards du Diable — I didn't work much on this one, but it is pretty cool; identify locations in Paris on the avenues radiating from the Arc de Triomphe.



• America's Least Wanted — a bunch of pictures of people doing weird stuff around town; you have to take photographs that match as closely as possible. Josh and I zoomed around Cambridge taking photos such as: