The World's Largest Scavenger Hunt

illuminatedwax writes "Every spring, University of Chicago students attempt to cast off their bookish tendencies and hold the world's largest scavenger hunt. Now, the event has been filmed by the student film group, Fire Escape, as a documentary, and is being sold on DVD and VHS from Periphrastic Films. The film follows the various teams and their effort to procure the off-the-wall 300+ items. For those who haven't heard of the University of Chicago Scav Hunt, its biggest claim to fame is from the 1999 hunt, when students built a working breeder reactor. Items during the 2002 Scav Hunt featured in the film include "Passports stamped by all three axes of evil", building "terrorist base camps" on the University quads, and students competing in a game show-style contest, featuring a DDR contest, and trivia like "Digits of Pi" and "Taylor Series." The Scav Hunt lists can be found here, and the 2002 list here."

Comments

Some interesting items...

[airrage]

221. Slick looking Linux Interface
222. A secure Windows Web Server
223. A geek with a girlfriend
224. A slashdot firstpost

Scav Hunt!!

[jonny-mt]

Wow, something about my school! Nice :) In case you don't know, Chicago can get a bit depressing in the Winter. The University does a bit to alleviate that, including giving us a day off in the middle of Winter quarter. Well, if Winter is depressing, then Spring is freedom. It gets warm, you take easy classes...it starts to feel like a real college. Scav Hunt is basically a four-day long party. You stay up late, skip classes, wine and dine the judges, throw a massive party in the middle of the quad, and go on cross-country trips. I think this film is a great treatment of a really unique experience, something you can only really do at University of Chicago.

Re:Scav Hunt!!

[djmitche]

Scavhunt has also included successful procurement of such fantastic items as a fully-suited hazmat team, live elephants, weapons-grade uranium (before The War On Terror(tm) started; IIRC it was made from the insides of flourescent light bulbs), and such trivialities as goldfish consumed alive, survivor islands on the quads, etc.

For a campus that prides itself of being bookish, and where Kant and Freud are a discussion topic at every party, scavhunt is a chance to get out in the bitter cold of Chicago and be, well, flamboyantly bookish :-)

Huh?

[bravehamster]

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that DDR == Dance Dance Revolutions, not DDR == Double Data Rate. I was trying to figure out how you had a DDR contest. Compare bandwidths, access rates and error checking? Let the man with the best CAS 2 Corsair win? Please tell me I'm not the only one.

Re:Huh?

[orthogonal]

It took me about 5 minutes to figure out that DDR == Dance Dance Revolutions

It took me a second too. I guess I'm just too old, but to me DDR still means the Deutsche Demokratische Republik, i.e., Communist East Germany.

What do you win?

[dagg]

I looked everywhere to try to figure out what you win. The best I could find is this in a PDF doc:

11. Prizes. Prizes are money. And a trophy, apparently.

So I wonder how much money?

--
Find Yer Sex (not part of the hunt)

Re:What do you win?

[Remik]

It's a negligable amount. About $500 for first place, which is at most 1/5th of the teams funds spent on the competition.

I was involved in the making of the Periphrastic film 'The Hunt' as a camera man and assistant. I must say it was the most fun I've had outside competition in the Hunt itself.

-R

Axis of Evil Passport Stamps

[Landaras]

That really doesn't sound that tough. How difficult is it to fly to...

• One)
  1330 Connecticut Avenue N.W., Suite 300
  Washington, D.C. 20036
  
  
• Two)
  15503 Ventura Blvd.
  Encino, California 91436
  
  and
  
  
• Three)
  One Microsoft Way
  Redmond, WA 98052-6399
  

Oh, wait. They must be referencing the President's State of the Union address. My bad...

Re:Scary

[Remik]

Yes, the nuclear breeder reactor was working before the judges made the team disassemble it. It was built on the steps of one of the University's main classroom buildings by the members of 'Matthews House' team in the Spring '99.

The people involved were physics majors, working in jobs with access to nuclear material.

Royko's Socks

[nightsweat]

For years and years, we put columnist Mike Royko's socks on the list. He had moved from the Sun-Times to the Tribune and done a commercial that ran something like -

"So, Mike, now that you're at the Tribune have you changed anything?"
"Only my socks."

The year they ran this commercial we put his socks on the list, figuring it was a good gag for one year. Royko, however, was really mean to the first group to ask him for his socks and printed a column berating the Scavenger Hunt and the U of C.

That's all it took. Pretty much until he died, Mike Royko's socks were on the list, guaranteeing he'd be bothered by geeks every year.

Re:Royko's Socks

[PD]

Just because Mr. Royko is dead isn't a reason to take his socks off the list. Presumably, he was buried with some.

"students built a working breeder reactor"

[Unknown Poltroon]

DUde. WHat the hell happend to stealing street signs. Shouldnt this be one of the primary signs that a scavenger hunt needs to be toned down?

150. a rubber duck
151. a watermellon
152. a hommemade nuclear reactor
153. a sample of the china syndrome in progress
154. george bush

Re:Reactor

[Helpadingoatemybaby]

Oh fantastic, you tell me that after . Now what do I do with this dang breeder reactor in my dorm room!!

I already got in trouble for the coffee mug hotplate.

I'm a veteran

[Chuckaluphagus]

I was on one of the top teams(Pierce) for my first three years, and a cameraman for the documentary this past year. Scav Hunt is one of the most enjoyable things I've ever had the luck to be part of. Four and a half days of caffeine, power tools, lewd behavior, and insanity.

Examples:

The above-mentioned breeder reactor. A bunch of advanced physics students cobbled, jury-rigged, and "borrowed" the necessary components. It was of the type used to make medical radio-isotopes, and therefore didn't receive full points, but it was real and scary as hell. The builders were known for wanting to build their own high-energy weapons for personal use.

"Fisher-Price Baby's First Flamethrower", a device that had to appeal to children and be operable by a three-year old. I'm quite proud of my work on that. Somewhere, we have the photos of that thing shooting out gouts of flame like a scene from a WW2 movie.

Sharlene, our "Chewing Gum Cannon". A device to launch a kilo of chewed gum. Points for distance and shortest time to launch. We used shells and produced a mortar with a range of 75 yards, easy.

A simulated air strike on Slobodan Milosevic. Involved more fireworks going off at one time than I ever want to see again. I have adrenalin-imprinted memories of running very fast in the opposite direction from the initial blast crater, roman candles scorching the air as they passed my head. The cops showed up and laughed until they had tears streaming down their faces.

If you're ever in Chicago on Mother's Day(the Day of Judgment every year), head down to the University to see what's been built/found/destroyed.

Re:I'm a veteran

[bobol6]

The above-mentioned breeder reactor. A bunch of advanced physics students cobbled, jury-rigged, and "borrowed" the necessary components.

This article brings back such lovely memories... I lived in Mathews House when Fred & Justin built their reactor. I've got a photo somewhere of the two of them, standing in front of the shed which housed the reactor, dressed in yellow radiation suits, drinking cheap champagne & Baily's, smoking cigarettes, and grinning like maniacs.

The builders were known for wanting to build their own high-energy weapons for personal use.

wanting to build? Fred & Justin had a lab on the 3rd floor of Kirsten; they used to spend nights in there drinking, smoking cigarettes, and building low-budget lasers, plasma cannons, and other implements of destruction. It's amazing what you can do with a 20,000 Volt power supply, a centiFarad capacitor, and your own custom pulse-forming network.

Response from the creator of the reactor

[Rufus211]

here's a respons from the creator of the reactor to some web board back in '99 when they did it:

Alright, I just want to set a couple things straight, so here are some
responses to oft heard comments the last few days:

1. "I assume they used U-238 to get to Pu-239..." we did not start
with any uranium or plutonium, that would have ruined the fun, and the
point was to make fissionable materials. Our starting material was
thorium, which can be found at any hardware store. we happened to have
some in our dorm room... The final products were Uranium 233 and
Plutonium 238. I'm not going to spoon feed the decay chains to anyone,
you can figure it out yourself if you really need to.

2. "You endangered the life of my son!" We created a neutron source
using some shit we pulled out of a trash can. This source was safer and
less radioactive than the radioisotope Americium 241 found in the smoke
detector in each of your rooms.

3. "Someone said your roommate lost his job because he built a nuclear
reactor" Neither I nor my rommmate have lost our jobs since doing this.

4. "I hear you paid another group to steal Plutonium for you" We did
not steal Uranium or Plutonium from anywhere. Nor did we have anyone
else steal some for us.

5. "but to qualify as a true breeder, doesn't the reaction have to be
self-sustaining?" No. A breeder reactor just means taking advantage of
all those tasty neutrons flying off from whatever source you have, be it
a sustained fission reaction or a naturally radioactive source. The
best neutron source on campus would be the Physics Dept's neutron
howitzer. But since the howitzer produces neutrons from the decay of
Plutonium, you have to agree it would be silly to use it to try and make
plutonium.

6. "(I'll be really impressed if the two come up with a micro-fusion
reactor.)" We'd fly back next year just for that one...

- Juniper Tasks

Just some clarification for the readers who've forgotten their nuclear
physics:

U-235 is the fissionable used in the Hiroshima bomb and Pu-239
in the Nagasaki bomb. U-238 is used in fast breeder reactors
to make weapons grade Pu-239. (U-238 is also used in fission-fusion-fission
bombs, so technically it is fissionable with a net gain of energy
but you need really fast neutrons).

Thorium was to have been used in slow breeder reactor technology which
turns out U-233 as its fissionable. (Is Pu-238 fissionable at low neutron
energies with a net gain? The even Z makes me think not...)

I thought you had started with depleted uranium to make a fast breeder;
didn't know the thorium isotope available from hardware stores was the
one used in slow breeders.
Well, with a small sample of thorium and a neutron source, you can make
the U-233. But with a fully functioning breeder don't you need some of the
U-233 created to fission and transform the rest of the thorium without
running away and slagging the reactor or damping out so you never
end up with more thorium than whatever's directly exposed to your
neutron source? I suppose the nuclear engineering definition of a
breeder has to be more pragmatic.

Fred and Justin didn't begin with any uranium.
(Uranium, after all, ain't a commonly available thing.) They began with some
thorium and an alpha source, which they just happened to have lying
around. They used the alpha source to make a neutron source, and bombarded
the thorium. This induced a chain of reactions, the final products of
which were fissionable uranium and plutonium.

Re:Reactor

[Captn Pepe]

This story comes up every so often, and is met with the same incredulity. I was there, on the team that built the reactor, so take it from me when I say that we did it. (Well, not so much we, as Fred and Justin did it with their mighty ninja atomic physicist powers; I was a first-year at the time, so my major contribution there was listening to them explain the scheme at breakfast.)

The fact is, a breeder reactor is just anything that is making plutonium, at least as far as the judges were concerned. So they made plutonium, by irradiating thorium from lantern mantles with a source they "borrowed" from the student labs. The tricky part was convincing the physics department to lend them a $20K proportional counter so they could detect the relaxation photons and thus prove plutonium production. After 36 hours of running they had a few hundred events that we figured corresponded to a total yield of 100K atoms or so.

Yes, purification would have been harder. No, we're not actually sure what eventually happened to the reactor.