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University of Chicago Scavenger Hunt Returns
mresolver writes "We've discussed it in previous years, and now the world's largest scavenger hunt at the University of Chicago has returned. The event may be best known for the working breeder reactor students built for the 1999 hunt. This year, some of the 330 list items (PDF) include 3-D (and 4-D) Twister, a hand-built Theremin, a recreation of the Moon landing, the world's largest Newton's Cradle, and hyperbolic crocheting."
We're gonna need a whole lot of Mentos and Diet Coke for that one!
My blog
a recreation of the Moon landing
The moon landing was staged at the university of Chicago!
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
All I do is Geocache :o(
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
What is up with PDF documents? (In this case, the list of items.) Why can't people just use normal hypertext? It makes it harder for people like me to view.
☠
what about the R.O.U.S.'s? ... and a PDF viewer for slimey
17. The Marx brothers' mirror sketch did not involve a mirror -- why should these?
27. A Turing machine. Is it OK if it's just equivalent to one?
45. Sounds like fun. How much money?
51. Tumbleweed. Believe it or not, they actually do have these in Chicago.
72. Angel Falls, MN?
206. Find Waldo in the Loop. Now, are you supposed to abduct him and take him back to show you found him?
240. Carhenge. I'm sure the photos will look great, but I'm keeping my distance.
304. "The Anarchist's Cookbook, complete with the Anarchist's Crock-pot."
"May not have received no moving violations or convictions or court-ordered supervision."
So does that mean you have to have a moving violation to drive?
Maybe my English parser is broken on Friday.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
252. While at Carhenge, drive the earth into the sun! [1,000,000,000 points; 2 points for effort]
Someone better get homeland security on the phone.
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They built a breeder reactor one year. After reading the principle behind the Theremin I don't think I'd put it past some students.
Have you ever seen $1,000,000? Well then, how do you know it exists? I want to see it. In cash.
[20 points; 180 bonus points if I see it at Judgment.]
Yeah okay. I'll see you guys at Judgment. I'll be the guy wearing the ski mask and holding an automatic weapon, with 5 of my friends.
Hey...I have a Theremin right here! Wait...what's this? "Made in Taiwan"....damn! That guy on EBay said he built it by hand! What a rip-off.
Well, maybe I can help with another one of the items in the scavenger hunt. I've knitted a parabola before and I'm sure that it would be easier to hyperbolic crochet...
Of course they can *build* one. Any kid in Junior High could build a Theremin, it's just a bunch of oscillators and mixers. From the rules, it sounded like they had to find one that was already built, by hand. (someone else's) Am I wrong here?
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
I have a co-worker who just completed a Theremin, built from scratch, using an original RCA design (that is, Leo).
I was playing with it a few minutes ago.
http://bedsidestory.livejournal.com/37706.html
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Thanks for pointing out the Theremin, I hadn't heard of them before.
The strangest video I just came across is a mashup of simpsons and star trek, the Theremin creates the wailing woman voice from the theme tune.
The Simpsons vs Star Trek
Remarkable instrument.
liqbase
It was a bit tricky to find, many pages talking about it were gone, but here it is.
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
Well, you may just ask Froogle. There, apart from some kits, and this "Hywatt" thing from a certain "Instrument Pro" company that I had never heard about, the most widely available Theremin comes from Moog, certainly not hand-made.
There was a documentary made of the U of C scavenger hunt a few years ago. You can buy it here. Or request that Netflix or your local library get a copy, so you can check it out.
* disclaimer- I know the people who made this film. I still liked it.
Can anyone tell me how to set my sig on Slashdot?
The way I read it was "hand built" as in "you can't go buy a kit".
Given some of the other items on the list, the list looks pretty open to interpretation.
If they build it by hand... why wouldn't it be 'hand built'. Other comments make it seem like some people make these in their free time, so maybe they just want them to find one that some one built in their free time.
Any MP3s of one of these things playing?
There are actually a lot of cheap optical theremins for sale, too. A lot easier to build than the classic style.
Limina.Log
As the PDF was downloading I was saying to myself 'Please be LaTeX, please be LaTeX'.
For some reason the fact that they did restores my faith in humanity.
-1 not first post
If it has flashing lights, wires, batteries and no explosives.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Seriously though, its nice to see that universities are still academic, but also just plain fun. Although it's pretty sad that we all get both parts of that joke...
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
I'm guessing they're going to want to enforce the property of the tape.
Boy that brings back some memories. When I was in college, my crotch was the subject of much hyperbole. Oh crocheting... never mind.
The point of the U of C Scavenger Hunt is not to go find things and bring them back. That would be exceedingly boring. The important thing for each item is that the solution be interesting. That means that would be great if you bring back a vintage theremin from 1960, or if you built one yourself. Even better would be to bring in a real theremin being helf by Brian Wilson. The main point of the Hunt is creativity. U of C is not MIT.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
Whole Lotta Love by Led Zeppelin has a theremin in the middle bit. I'm sure you can find a performance on Youtube.
ResidntGeek
What does this have to do with MIT?
A lot of people compare the U of C Scavhunt to a similar event at MIT. I forget what it's called, though.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
The MIT Mystery Hunt is not similar, it's not even a scavenger hunt - it's much more creative..
web.mit.edu/puzzle/www
If I recall correctly, doesn't each puzzle have a unique solution? Hardly what I'd call "creative"...
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
...or someone has to come up with a driving-qualified robot that's at least 18 years old (hey Mr. Wells, can I borrow your Time Machine for a bit?)
... ...
Driver Requirements:
- (a) Minimum age of 18
- (e) Must be alcohol- and drug-free (it's the way to be), including illegal, prescription, and non-prescription drugs.
Sorry guys, but that disqualifies most humans. Most foodstuffs are verifiable (non-prescription) drugs. Also, imagine a driver not allowed to drink any coffee during such an ordeal, I wouldn't want to be in a car with him/her. Not to mention this is discriminating people who are dependent on medication to stay healthy.
The Hacker's Guide To The Kernel: Don't panic()!
than even Kuviasungnerk (the winter festival that involves getting up before dawn to do calisthenics by the lakeshore in the snow). U of Chicago invents these weird activities for students to have "fun" while obliterating student-created traditions like SleepOut (camping out on the main quad to register for classes) or the Lascivious Ball (students and professors dressing in lingerie and attending a gothic ball). Thus, no one attends them.
U of C students have variously dubbed the university as the place where "fun goes to die" or where "hell DOES freeze over." In the 90's a national ranking of party schools placed it dead last, below even West Point, the Naval Academy, and Brigham Young University. All of this is deserved, since aside from killing student traditions as soon as they rear their heads, they also have never thought to build a student center or to allow the EL stops that reach campus to operate so that Hyde Park residents might be able to escape the neighborhood once in a while.
In short, the Scavenger Hunt is not worth valorizing, nor the institution that holds it. Friends don't let friends have anything to do with the University of Chicago.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
It takes a huge amount of creativity to figure out the solution to any puzzle (there's no instructions for any puzzle)
what's so creative about U of C thing, maybe I'd call it minor thinking outside the box..
How big is the current world's largest Newton's Cradle, anyways?
The creativity lies not only in the solution to the puzzle (there are many different kinds of puzzles, from solving secret codes to figuring out cryptic clues on a road trip), but in how to interpret the problem itself. There aren't any instructions on a lot of the Scavhunt items, either. Also, it allows people to be creative in a lot of different ways: music, acting, art, ninjas, etc. It's very interesting how the two contests show the vastly different characters of each school.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
I assume you mention Brian Wilson because of the theremin sound in "Good Vibrations"? Because that's not a theremin.
Maybe you're right, because I go to MIT and sort think the Chicago version is lame. It's easy to come up with a solution when you're able interpret the question any way you like, but finding elegant solutions to a difficult problem is more interesting. For example, there is a riddle called 100 prisoners and a lightbulb, where you have a lightbulb in a room and prisoners are selected in random orders to enter the room and either keep the lightbulb in its current state or toggle it. You want to minimize the amount of time before one of the prisoners can declare that he knows that all 100 prisoners have entered the room. People always come up with "creative" solutions like breaking the bulb in 100 pieces and use them as markers... but at some point these are far more obvious and less interesting than the actual mathematical solutions.
I think you should look at some mystery hunt puzzles, they are very deep and I'd say more difficult. They include "solving secret codes" and "figuring out cryptic clues on a road trip", often in the same puzzle. At some point, if the MIT mystery hunt was more like the Chicago scavenger hunt, it just wouldn't be that hard. A quarter of the participants in the mystery hunt are adults from across the country, professional puzzle solvers and writers.
I haven't got anything against Chicago, I think it's a very cool school, but to say that Chicago is somehow a more creative school because of their scavenger hunt is completely ridiculous.
The U of C hunt can never (and should never) attract professionals from across the country because it's about students having fun :) So you're right, it is a creativity of a different kind. I think it's just as challenging as the MIT game because you have to actually build and do things.
We're about teams creating a shopping cart go-kart in the shape of a Wacky Racer, building a functioning pinball table from scratch, giving blood, drinking and partying on Friday, going to a quiz game where you have to recite pi, list the constitutional amendments AND answer baseball trivia, begging a building manager to let you flick some lights on and off in their building to spell out "SH", and finishing up your sculpture of the alien from Alien, in less than 4 days. Most people don't sleep.
The MIT puzzle is about solving incredibly convoluted puzzles, like one where the solution is "find the RL Stein books these pictures are from, then figure out that the symbols we gave you are from a palm pilot, then find out which key that punctuation is on on a keyboard, then take that number of the title, and a synonym of the resulting word is the solution." I'm sure people don't sleep there either, but they're thinking and not creating. That's what I mean by "creative."
It's like comparing a crossword puzzle to... fuck I dunno. Comparing it to the scav hunt, really. And to be honest, the MIT puzzle does sound like a lot of fun. I think the reason for the difference is that U of C students have to sit inside and think and read and be theoretical all day while you bastards at MIT are making piano playing robots or whatever. The respective hunts both seem like reactions to that.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?