Humanities Week 2022, “Human/Ties”

For IHGC’s Humanities Week 2022, Puzzle Poesis staged its first annual grounds-wide scavenger hunt of puzzles and riddles.

The Humanities Week theme for the year was “Human/Ties” or “Humanities,” a playful title that inspired our poem-puzzles. Indeed, the phrase “human ties” was used to reverse engineer a series of ciphers, concluding with an encrypted pentameter line from Alexander Pope: “Love free! As air at sight of human ties” (from Eloisa and Abelard), the final ciphered solution. This fragment of poetry was encoded into a cipher wheel inspired by Thomas Jefferson. Built up as a hexagonal prism we laser inscribed the faces of each with the lines of poetry found at each of the five locations. The puzzle is shown below, newly cut and resting on the bed of an A-School

The hunt itself started with an “easy peasy” cipher.

A hint,
CEASY PEASY → HJFXD UJFXD

Prepared the way for the first cipher:
BWNYNSLHJSYJWGWDFS

The solution to which was:
WRITINGCENTERBRYAN

Teams then discovered the next QR code at the Bryan Hall Writing Center. So the pattern continued, with teams receiving a hint for the cipher and the enciphered text itself at each location, the solution to which pointed the way to the next location.

The following set took inspiration from a project by a friend of Puzzle Poesis, alumni Sam Lemley, and involved an early modern paper-based cipher that Lemley describes in a YouTube video.

Hint:
FRIENDLY LEMLEY REM

Cipher:

Solution:
CANADANAU

The next cipher was in “Canada,” that is, the present-day South Lawn which was built on land historically associated with a nineteeth-century free Black community so named. This next cipher used the “one-time pad” system, the focus of the WWII counterintelligence program known as the Venona Project.

Hint:
ONE (UPON A) TIME (IN FAIR) VENONA

Cipher:
DUMLWCNLIPMPIZGDIZJXNBH

Solution:
PHIRHOALPHALAMBDAIOTANU

The third cipher required teams to search the Fralin for their next QR code and cipher, where the set borrowed from Edgar Allan Poe’s cryptologic short story, “The Gold Bug”.

Hint:
POE PUTS THE AU IN AUREALIAN

Cipher:
8;8( ?†8( .06*:

Solution:
ENTER UNDER PLINY

The fourth location was Brooks Hall, home of the Anthropology department, with the QR code hidden in a display case. This last online puzzle required teams to search the UVa Library Virgo database for a Thomas Jefferson cipher sheet.

Hint:
♌︎ __ ♎︎ MSS 38-285

Cipher:
146 276 348 330 399 21 507 243 350 350 117 580

Solution:
HARRISONSMALLSOUTHGALLERY

There, at the Small Special Collections Gallery a teams were prompted to request the front desk for one last puzzle, the cipher wheel (pseudo-catalogued under MSS-Wheel5), which they had to use to decrypt the line of verse by Alexander Pope.

The first place winner was Larb Conquest (Lara Ojha, Thomas Williams, Ryan Kenyon, and Ben Wieland). Second place went to Team Rita 13 (Maija Hatanpaa, Veronika Hughes, Genevieve Hebert). Third place was awarded by a drawing among all the other finishers of the hunt, and we algorithmically picked the team named <3 Friendship (Sarah Tanvir, Grace Do, and Emily Liu).

Credits for Humanities Week 2022, Criss Cross Verse
Site Developer: Colin Buyck
Cipher Author: Brenna Courtney
Designer: Alexander Maksiaev
Data Entry Specialist: Jason Bennett
Marketing Executive: Maryann Xue
Logistics Coordinator: Mary Margaret Lea
Humanities Week Liaison: Rebecca Barry
Puzzle Poetry Co-Leader: Brad Pasanek