Husky Hunt

Last class, I mentioned how I have participated in the Husky Hunt for the past two years.  I have had great experiences both times and would highly recommend it to anyone who has not yet done it.

Anyone can sign up for the Hunt initially, but then only 50 teams with 12 members each get to actually do the Hunt. To narrow down the participants to only 50 teams, people take a preliminary quiz and the top 50 teams with the best times/scores get in.

There were riddles that had to be solved and so it required the 12 people on my team to put our heads together and figure it out. But these aren’t any ordinary riddles like you would find in a book. It was clear that RSA had people from many different backgrounds, majors, and expertise to make the riddles and thus we recruited the same diversity for our team.

To be completely honest, I had no idea how to do any of the riddles. No idea where to start or anything; in fact, I felt completely useless. But then as people started to figure out how to solve the riddles, and the momentum was built, I came up with ideas based off of their ideas, and together we solved most of them, if not all.

When trying to solve the riddles, people would bring up their possible solutions. We would then pick the best one and work off of it until we either solved the riddle, or got stuck. If we got stuck, this then forced us to reconsider someone else’s possible solution.

The Husky Hunt is a prime example of how information cascades should NOT happen. In a situation such as this one, we need to be open-minded and take into consideration, everyone’s opinions, especially since we never know the answers to the riddles until all 50 teams have submitted them.