(Not) Derailing the LessOnline Puzzle Hunt

(spoiler alert: may meta-spoil future iterations of the LOPH, if you haven’t already read other posts about it)

I knew early on that I wouldn’t be able to finish the LessOnline puzzle hunt.

I contributed to solving two of the first six puzzles, each of which revealed the combination to a locked box. Each box contained wooden medallions for the solvers, plus a QR code. The QR codes led to the second layer of a larger meta-puzzle.

On discovering the existence of the meta-puzzle, I knew I would have to drop out. It was a shame, because I have never done a puzzle hunt before and I could see that the puzzlemasters had produced something amazing. But the opportunity cost of playing “for real” was just too high. There were too many other things I wanted to do, and the integral of my attention over time is not infinite.

So I stopped hunting. But, unexpectedly and hilariously, I ended up contributing to the game in a very different way.

Suspicion

During the Fooming Shoggoth concert I noticed (probably thanks to the song lyrics) that the parts of the puzzle I was aware of were all lockboxes. I mean, I knew that already, but now I noticed. And I knew from the contents of the two boxes I had opened that there was more to the puzzles than the obvious. The whole setup seemed like a suspiciously plausible metaphor for the AI Box Experiment.

I suddenly, strongly suspected that the puzzle hunt had a hidden narrative—one that would end with the release of a rogue AI.

Sequence Breaker!

So I did what any Less Wronger should have done: I tried to warn others. No unbinding of seals, no opening of gates! At first I just told nearby hunters directly, but quickly realized it wouldn’t work; if nothing else, I didn’t know who was working on the puzzle hunt and who wasn’t. I abandoned that plan and asked the front desk to print out three notes for me. The notes outlined my suspicions and warned the reader not to open whatever final box might be found at the end of the puzzle chain.

I taped Note 1 to my medallion, which I returned to its original box. In addition to the warning, Note 1 asked anyone opening the box to leave the medallion and the note itself for later hunters to see, and suggested they return their own medallion(s), just in case. I had no reason to believe it mattered whether the medallions stayed in the boxes, but I had no reason to believe it didn’t either, and it was an obvious thing to try.

I taped Note 2 to the table by the lockboxes. Note 2 asked anyone who shared my suspicions to sign it, as social pressure on others to not open boxes that might contain Very Bad Things.

Note 3 was a copy of note 2, and stayed in my backpack for contingencies.

After placing the notes, I moved on to other things. I’d volunteered to run a talk the following day on a whim, and preparation funged against sleep. By the time I had the slide deck put together it was 4am. Before going to bed, I checked on my warning notes.

Note 2 was gone.

I’d thought of that possibility, which was why I had a contingency copy. Now I had to decide whether to use it. Crap.

Decision Theory

So far I’d been intentionally open about what I was doing. I told multiple hunters about both my suspicions and the notes. I showed Note 1 to a volunteer when placing it. Note 2 was in plain sight. I even had a staff member at the front desk print the notes for me. My in-character warnings to hunters doubled as an out-of-character warning to the puzzlemasters: “possible derailment in progress”. I didn’t want to actually ruin whatever awesomeness they had planned. I wanted to prevent hunters from opening the hypothetical final box if and only if that was the true win condition.

The problem was that I didn’t know—and couldn’t know—whether the note-removal was an in-character action by the villain(s?) to keep the heroes in the dark, or an out-of-character action by the puzzlemasters to get my spanner out of their works. I hadn’t progressed far enough through the puzzles to see the underlying narrative; I was guessing. I didn’t know whether replacing the note would be meta-cooperation or meta-defection.

Ultimately, Note 3 stayed in my pack. I preferred letting the villain win to screwing up the event.

Failure

I found out later that it wouldn’t have mattered—by the time I placed the notes, someone else was already working the final puzzle on the other end of campus.^[1] But I didn’t know that at the time.

I also didn’t know that the final puzzle did not, in fact, involve a box. It was something else entirely.

But it did release a rogue AI named Agendra, which proceeded to take over Lightcone and LessWrong, albeit without going on to kill everyone in the world. Vindication that doesn’t involve being dead is the best vindication!

At the recap session, Ricki (one of the puzzlemasters) called me out for throwing spanners in the works (do I know you well enough for the obvious joke about sempais to not be creepy?), and I got to tell this story to the hunters (in rather less detail). I then asked if I could have one of the puzzle hunt prizes, on the grounds that even though I hadn’t solved most of the puzzles I had noticed the trap and done the narratively correct thing. Does that count as winning?

She responded “Absolutely...not!” And later noted that my actions hadn’t actually stopped Agendra from taking over. Which I have to admit is an excellent point.

But as far as I know, I was the only one to twig on the trap and try to do something about it, and that feels pretty good anyway!

(For the record, I didn’t actually expect a prize, (though I certainly would have taken one); the exchange was entirely humorous.)

Afterword

I’m writing this up the day after, while it’s still fresh in my head. This was a kind of fun that came completely out of left field. It turns out that catching twists feels much cooler when you didn’t know there was even a story to twist. Sadly, much like a certain Dear Me note, it’s a kind of fun that I suspect I’ll only get to have once a lifetime. In future I’ll always be aware of the possiblity.

I’d love to know what my efforts looked like from the puzzlemasters’ end. I’m told there was a discussion about it and they nearly left the notes alone, I think because I was just wrong enough that even with the warning hunters might have still gotten caught. But it’s been fragments here and there and I don’t have a full picture.

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On re-reading Agendra’s own post, I think the person who told me this might have been wrong. I discovered the missing note about four hours after Fooming Shoggoth, and the other post says the players continued to work on things for 19 hours. Maybe I should have replaced the note!