MIT Mystery Hunt

The MIT Mystery Hunt is an annual puzzlehunt competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As one of the oldest and most complex puzzlehunts in the world, it attracts roughly 60 teams and 2,500 contestants annually, in teams of 5 to 200 people. It has inspired similar competitions at Microsoft, Stanford University,Melbourne University,University of South Carolina, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of Aveiro (Portugal) as well as in the Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, Washington, DC, Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio metropolitan areas. Because the puzzle solutions require knowledge of esoteric and eclectic topics, the hunt is often fused withpopular stereotypes of MIT students.

The hunt begins at noon on the Friday before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day when the teams assemble to receive the first puzzles. It concludes with a runaround to find a "coin" hidden on MIT's campus. Each puzzlehunt is created and organized by the winning team of the previous year, which can lead to substantial differences in the rules and structure. While early hunts involved a few dozen linear puzzles, recent hunts have increased in complexity, some involving as many as 160 distinct puzzles arranged in rounds, hidden rounds, and metapuzzles. Recent hunts have also revolved around themes introduced as a skit by organizers at the opening ceremony.

The objective of the hunt is to solve a set of puzzles in order to locate a coin hidden on the MIT campus. Participants can organize into teams of any size and are not required to be physically present. In recent years, team sizes have grown to around 200 solvers for the largest teams. The proportion of hunters who participate remotely has grown over time, as well.

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