I’m excited to announce that early next year, the first ever β3 Riddle Search will take place!
Because β3 β 1.73, the search will take place on January 73rd, (counting February 1st as January 32nd, February 2nd as January 33rd, and so on.)
Hooray! I’ve finally been doing this long enough to be able to make a classic “ate pie” pun! I probably wouldn’t have expected to keep making hunts for this long when I started. I’m 24 now, so that means I’ve been doing this for a whole 1/3 of my life! (Well technically, my life hasn’t been exactly an integer number of years long, so that denominator should really be a number slightly larger than 3… and speaking of numbers slightly larger than 3:)
The Greek letter directly after omicron is pi, so now that the omicron wave seems to have mostly subsided (speaking optimistically), that means it’s time for Pi Day! I much prefer pi-related sinusoidal waves to the omicron sinus-related wave.
P.I.HUNT 8 is jigsaw puzzle themed. I’ve found it funny that the canonical icon for puzzles seems to be a jigsaw puzzle piece, and googling “puzzle” returns almost entirely results about jigsaws, yet puzzle hunts rarely have jigsaws in them at all.
Actually, when I say “P.I.HUNT 8 is jigsaw puzzle themed”, I actually mean “P.I.HUNT 8 is a jigsaw”! The original plan was going to be to laser cut it and have a physical jigsaw (which is why everything in the hunt was made with vector graphics), but that ended up being expensive, and I’d like to keep P.I.HUNT as a free thing to play. Plan B was going to be using some online collaborative site like Google Jamboard, but each one I looked at lacked some feature that was important (e.g. in Google Jamboard, you can’t select multiple pieces at once, which is extremely important for solving a jigsaw puzzle.)
I ended up making a multiplayer Unity game, which is what’s linked below. There’s also a MANUAL.txt which I highly recommend reading through the entirety of. I think solving with a team would be fun (but it’s still optional, of course) partially because the puzzles skew somewhat harder than normal, but also because jigsaw puzzles are always fun to do collaboratively π
This program was a major last-minute hacky operation, and I’m a little worried about it totally breaking. I’ve never made a game that requires connecting through the internet before, and multiplayer netcode is always scary, but hopefully it goes well! If you want to tell me bugs, or have other things you want to say, you can email me at jack[dot]l[dot]lance[at]gmail[dot]com or on Discord as Jack Lance#3467. (I like to hear from people, which is why I’ve used email for answer checking in the past, but it turns out I’m bad at responding to emails and making people wait for a response before they can continue a hunt feels bad.)
One last thing: I included a build for Mac because Unity has an option to make a build for Mac, so hopefully everything just automatically works, but I’ve only tested it on PC. (EDIT: One solver just told me that it originally didn’t work, but they got it to work by running chmod +x PIHUNT.app/Contents/MacOS/Pi in the terminal, and another says a more user-friendly way to open the application on Mac would be to right-click the application, click Show Package Contents, click MacOS, then click that file. If it gives a warning, go to System Preferences > Security and Privacy and allow it to open.)
ERRATUM: The piece that says “1B” on it is an error. When you see this piece, you can cross out the “1B” on it.
We’ve gone about another 2 pi radians around the sun again, which means it must be time for P.I.HUNT again! This year is the 22nd year of the century, and the 7th P.I.HUNT, which means that my average time for hunt production this century will be 22/7 by the end of this year, the common approximation for pi! π This is definitely a natural statistic to look at and not contrived at all to make this year’s Pi Day seem special like I do every year. If that’s not special enough, there’s something else interesting that happened this year (in some time zones, at least.) There were two notable occurrences today, as close as is possible for them to occur without overlapping. Namely, Pi Minute (which has the first 6 digits of pi), is 3/14, 1:59 AM, and Daylight Savings Time begins 3/14, 2:00 AM.
About this year’s hunt: I was feeling very demotivated about writing hunt puzzles at one point during the year, and I was thinking about cancelling the hunt. But I ended up deciding not to cancel it, and take the pieces of puzzles I had written and combine it into a full hunt. Something I notice myself doing sometimes is trying to raise the bar for myself over and over, until it gets to a point where I can’t pass over it anymore, and I think this is a good thing to notice when it’s happening and relax my expectations. (More specifically, I really am happy with how P.I. 4 and P.I. 5 turned out, so if you haven’t seen those you might also want to check them out!) As a result of this, the puzzles ended up a little scattered in some places in terms of varying in scale or difficulty level. Overall, I’m quite happy I ended up finishing this hunt, and I still think I made something I can be proud of. π
The theme of the hunt is very vaguely Scooby-Doo themed (basically that’s just the theme of the meta.) There are 8 puzzles this year, and a meta. I’ll send the meta once you have solved at least 5 of the puzzles. Email me at jack[dot]l[dot]lance[at]gmail[dot]com to confirm your answers, or for other comments/hint-requests/questions.
ΗΖΙnΖuΙΛ₯ lΙsΙΉΗΚuα΄-uβ©
Hey there, I’m 23 π
There have been a lot of changes since I turned 22. I both started and stopped working at Google since then! Here’s a puzzle themed around 23 and change:
Take 23 cents arranged in the 2 above, and change them into the 3 (pretend all pennies are indistinguishable, and all nickels are indistinguishable.)
You can make 5 moves, and each move consists of picking a contiguous group with 1 nickel and 2 pennies, and moving that group, without rotation, to a new spot.
It’s been a while since the last time I posted pen-and-paper logic puzzles.
Here’s a set of puzzles inspired by TheGreatEscaper’s The Witless:
It’s Pi Day again, and what a nice looking pi date it is. 3/14/20 has every digit from 0 to 4 exactly once, meaning it can represent a permutation. If only there was a nice Greek letter that we could use to denote a permutation. π
It feels like a good time to be running a completely not-in-person online-only event. If other events you were planning to go to have cancelled, or you are planning to being inside for a while, hopefully this hunt can provide some amusement.
That being said, this year’s P.I.HUNT is not going to be as big as the last few years. (P.S. This isn’t a bluff where there’s secretly a second round of puzzles after you get through the first set. I did legitimately make less puzzles this year.) After last year, many people sent me advice (which also just so happened to be the final meta answer) about what to do if I’ve been working too much with not enough play, so this year I decided to scope down & not work too hard. I was hoping to make 6 puzzles for P.I.6, but I guess I took it too easy, and only managed to finish 5. Hopefully this won’t affect things too much and you’ll still be able to figure out most of the meta without the 6th puzzle.
If you did 2019’s MIT Mystery Hunt, you’ll remember it was about combining various pairs of holidays. There was even a Pi Day Town! If it were up to me, Pi Day Town would have been in the center and connected to everything else, so I decided to take things into my own hands and do a Halloween/Pi Day mash up this year. The puzzles are themed around various fears, and once you solve the puzzles, you’ll be able to determine “What is my biggest fear?” (You won’t need any additional info for the meta. You can contact me to confirm answers if you want (jack dot l dot lance at gmail dot com) but there’s nothing to unlock.)
So, that’s probably enough introduction. Here’s PUMPKIN PI HUNT:
[Missing]
Hey there,
Is it Valentine’s Day already? We’re getting EXTRA CLOSE TO NEW PI. There’s only a month until the 6th P.I. Hunt!
Solve the anagram to learn what you should do to prepare:
EXTRA CLOSE TO NEW PI = ????? ????????????
Hi! I’m 22 now!
Last year I posted a puzzle about measuring alcohol, and each even year has been a harder version of the same type as the odd year, so be warned for a very difficult liquid and cup puzzle!
I’ve graduated college now, and moved to a job, which means I can finally afford two cups. You’re now given 2 cups, both perfect cubes made of glass of negligible thickness with a volume of 22 units of alcohol. That’s way too much for me! Your goal is to measure exactly 1 unit for me.
You’re also supplied with a tap, that acts as an infinite source. Assume that the cups are see through, so you can fill one cup to the height of the other. Also if you rotate a cube to some angle, you are able to hold it still at that angle if you want. You don’t have a marker and can’t make any markings on the cups.
Good luck! Next time will be less mathy probably, but you’ll have to wait another year for it.
Hello! Last year was the 30th anniversary of Pi Day, which makes this year the 31st. That’s got the first two digits of pi, rather than just the first one, and so is even more of a milestone and clearly not just me making up reasons to call every Pi Day special. (I’m not the only one…) I may have gone a little insane making the puzzles this year, I’m sure my mental state wasn’t too affected though. I can’t wait for you all to see what I’ve been working on during the past year.
There are 14 non-meta puzzles, all of which start off unlocked and are linked below. I’ll send the first meta once you get at least 4 answers that go to it, and it will answer the question “What should Jack do if he’s gone crazy from work?” and the second meta once that’s solved and you get at least 4 answers for it, which will answer the question “Now that Jack’s followed your advice, rather than dull, how is he feeling?” (I will let you know which puzzles go to which metas when you unlock them)
Email me at jack[dot]l[dot]lance[at]gmail[dot]com to confirm your answers. You can also email if you get stuck and want hints, or just any comments, errata, or questions. Also, feel free to work individually or as a team, and solve now or anytime after now.
So, without further all, work and no play makes Jack. A dull boy all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy:
All 1
Work And
NΒΊ Play
Makes, Jack, A, Dull
BOY ALL!
Workandno
Play!
Makes
Jack A**
Dull Boy
All% Wo. Rk.
– and |, no /
Play Makes
Jack A Dull Boy
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