Rules and Tips

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Organization — About the Puzzles — Tips for Solving and for Collaborating.

EC’21 Puzzle Hunt: Enthralling Conundrums is an online puzzle hunt created by Solving Fun in July 2021 for the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’21). The puzzles may include references to the conference. The puzzle hunt will be played on Monday, July 19th 2021.
This is a private event, the Puzzles page is password-protected and accessible only to the participants. Please ask me for permission before sharing a puzzle with someone not related to the conference.

There are 4 puzzles in total. They are in puzzle-hunt style: they come with no, or minimal, instructions. The first step is to figure out what to do, and use the information or data to extract some meaning. They often require one intuitive leap in thinking (or aha-moment) to solve.
The goal is to find the answer to each puzzle. The answer is always an English word or an English phrase.
You may use the internet to search for information (some of the puzzles are impossible to solve without looking things up).
To check your answer, you must enter it in a specific field (in a Google Form) just below the corresponding puzzle. The form will validate if and only if this is the correct answer. You should write each answer in lowercase, and without spaces.
Submitting your answer in the form also enters your team into the “leaderboard” for each puzzle.
Each puzzle is entirely contained in a pdf file. You don’t need to do technical things to the pdf (nothing hidden in the metadata or concealed by steganography!). There are no clues on this website outside the pdf files.
It is not necessary to print the puzzles. But it may be useful to have a way to annotate or draw on the pdf electronically.

(what to do if you are stuck)

If you are confident in your answer, but the form does not accept it, check that you typed it correctly (lowercase, without spaces), and that you indeed have the complete answer (in some puzzles there may be an indication of the word length(s) of the answer).
Re-read the title and the introductory text carefully. They may contain clues.
Consider what information you haven’t used yet.
Thoroughly check the work that you’ve already done.
Google things you don’t know. Google things you know.
Take a break, look at another puzzle, ask a friend.
Look up a specific hint in the Hints page, or ask the facilitator for a custom hint, or by email.

(when solving as a team during a videoconference)

One team member can share their screen with the puzzle on it, so that everyone can annotate the screen.
Use the virtual whiteboard in the videoconference software.
Use a shared folder (e.g. in Google Drive) and share notes in documents or worksheets among your team.