The Washington Post Hunt

I don’t think Dave Barry, Tom Shroder, and Gene Weingarten set out to create a wonderful demonstration of the difference between knowledge and intelligence, but they sure did — at least for me.

This Sunday I drove up to Washington, D.C., for the first (annual?) Post Hunt — a giant, public, puzzle game held all over downtown D.C.

“Puzzle game.” Let me explain for those who aren’t familiar with the Miami Tropic Hunt, which this is based on. (Or, for you grammarians, “upon which this is oh go screw yourselves.”)

Thousands of people play. You go to the starting point, as explained in that week’s Post Magazine. You are given five locations on a map of the downtown. At each of those five locations is a puzzle waiting for you — a large, public puzzle. The answer to each puzzle is a number, and the number leads you to a phrase in the magazine.

The magazine lists lots of numbers and phrases, but only five will mean anything. The rest are red herrings.

So you might solve a puzzle, get an answer of “12,” and then know that phrase #12 is important.

When you get all five phrases, you go back to the starting point at 3:00 where you are given a final clue that you use in conjunction with those five phrases to unravel another location with another puzzle. Solve that first and win the prize. (Actually, there are prizes for first, second, and third.)

The puzzles are neat. They were smart but not too smart — good enough to weed out the posers, but not so tough that only dedicated puzzle people would win.

That was important to me, because I was with a group of members of the National Puzzlers’ League, having been invited by my friend (and NPL member) Eric. I felt like I was playing a game of touch football with the NY Giants.

When it comes to puzzles, these guys are the best. Several were featured in the movie Wordplay, for example, including at least one of the three others on my team. (There were 15 NPLers in the group, divided into four teams.)

So I hoped against hope to make some kind of contribution to my team.

I won’t go into details of all the puzzles — Eric does that on his blog — but I’ll share one example.

We went to a museum. In front were three signs (the photo below shows other hunters staring at them):

13 ?

14 ?

15 ?

Hmm. We remember that this same building was the subject of a puzzle in the Post magazine — one of those “find the differences” things. You had to find 12 differences.

“So,” said Eric, “There must really be 15 differences. We just have to find the other three.”

Problem 1: If you found 15 differences, how would you know which three were the ‘additional’ ones?

Problem 2: If you found three differences, how would that make a number?

We stared at the puzzle in the magazine, finding the 12 differences. Some involved numbers, most didn’t.

Then I said, “Hey, in the magazine the U’s are U’s, but on the museum they’re V’s.” That is, in person it’s a MVSEVM, but in the magazine photos it’s a MUSEUM.

Eric immediately jumps. “That’s it!”

Huh? I thought it might be important, but didn’t get how. Apparently Eric did. He realized immediately that there where three V’s that had become U’s. Therefore differences number 13, 14, and 15 were V, V, V — or 555. Which was the answer.

Knowledge vs. intelligence. I had one, but not the other. In fact, it took me a minute to get it; I even stopped Eric and said, “Wait, what? Explain it.” Then it was obvious, although Eric thought it was funny “to have to explain the answer to the guy who found it.”

Which was the point — I found the data that others had missed, but data are useless without someone with the intelligence to use it.

A similar thing happened at the end game — the final puzzle, where I finally got to contribute again. The clue my teammates finally figured out (and don’t ask me to explain) was FORMER NAME CAPS HOME.

To me, that was obvious: What was the former name of the home of the Washington Capitols hockey team? (Now they play at the Verizon Center.) I convinced Eric to bug his wife at home. She Googled it — it was the MCI center.

Then I screwed up. “No, no, before all the corporate naming stuff.” But that was a dead end and we were stuck.

Then, off-hand, I said, “MCI is also a Roman numeral. What is it, 1,101?”

And Eric says, “That’s it! That’s it!” He remembered that a building on the cartoon Hunt map was number 1101. We raced there, but too late.

And again, it was a case of knowledge vs. intelligence. I had the data — I knew “CAPS” meant the Capitols — but I simply wasn’t smart enough to realize I had the answer in “MCI.”

I felt like the little kid in the movie who says off-hand to the hero, “Yeah, my  dog barks at night a lot” to which the hero shouts, “Of course! He must hear the screech of bats! The criminals are in the belfry!”

So I felt helpful, but boy I wish I could have made that extra leap to know what those data meant.

There’s a lesson in team-building there, though. You need a mix of people — those who know a lot, those who are smart enough to run with the data, and some who are good enough to bring them together.

(Right: Four presidents and a “buck” prepare to race. The answer to this puzzle turned out to be ‘A buck, plus a quarter (Washington), plus a penny (Lincoln)’ — $1.26 or simply 126. I didn’t get it.)

Eric poses at the main gathering place for the Hunt, about 15 minutes before it began.

Rain, schmain — at the endgame there were still thousands of people waiting for the final clue.