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MIT Libraries Puzzle Challenge
Released November 21, 2008; deadline was December 5, 2008. A quick first step to take at the start of this puzzle is to notice that the first letters of all of the clues, read down, spell the word "LION" over and over. A quick search for LION in Vera turns up the Literature Online resource, an online database of the full-text of English and American prose, poetry, and drama. This is a good hint that these clues are probably referring to something from English or American literature. The next piece to focus on is the top line; an important thing to notice is that the first word can be unscrambled to the word "POET" and the second word can be unscrambled by the same permutation to the word "POEM." Using that same permutation repeatedly to unscramble the string of text, you come up with "THIS_IS_AN_EXAMPLE_LINE." Now the task is to unscramble the rest of the lines in a similar manner, where the first word is the name of a poet, the second word the name of one of their poems, and the string of text is the indicated line from that poem. This can be done fairly efficiently using LION, and after finding a few, you may even be able to narrow down the search breadth (these are all, in fact, from the category "American Poetry of the Modernist Period, 1899-1945"). The descrambled clues look like this:
Each of the lines of poetry is missing one letter. At first glance, these letters don't spell anything. However, the line numbers to the poems are all between 1 and 26, and so if we map them to their corresponding letters of the alphabet, we get the final instructions: "SORT MISSING LETTERS BY TITLE." If we reorganize the missing letters in alphabetical order by the titles of the poems, they spell "THE ANSWER IS COLLECTED WORKS." webmaster@libraries.mit.edu
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