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Puzzle Hunt index

Miao at the 2026 MIT Mystery Hunt

Captaining a ninety-person team to ninth place—and a first finish for an all-Chinese team.

19 January 202610 min readWilliam Chen

Puzzle hunts turn intelligence into infrastructure. The decisive question is often not whether someone can solve a puzzle, but whether the right person can find it at the right moment.

Miao grew across years, languages, and time zones. At the 2026 Mystery Hunt, the team finished ninth globally.

This is a report about queues, trust, handoffs, and the strange collective joy of a room realizing the same thing at once.

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