by Foggy Brume, Dan Katz, and Greg Lohman, inspired by an event by Martin Eiger, inspired by a game by Marsha Falco

Featuring Greg Lohman as Scotchy, Amanda O'Connor as Leah, Zack Butler as Vice President Gordon, Mike Selinker as the Holodeck Manager, and Dan Katz, Stephen Peters, Ken Stern, and Graham Wright as the UPGAFS SETI Team
Answer: INGENIOUS

This event's special guests, Scotchy and Leah, gave each three-person team delegation this sheet when they entered, and each person got a card from this deck. This allowed them to play the game SETI.

This was a modified version of the game Set, but these cards varied by skin color (blue-, red-, or green-skinned), race (human, robot, or cyborg), time period (past, present, or future), and home quadrant (alpha, beta, or gamma). The goal was to make a set of three cards, each from a member of a different team, in which all three cards had:

• the same color, or three different colors,
• the same race, or three different races,
• the same time, or three different times, and
• the same quadrant, or three different quadrants.

Once a team accumulated five points, they received this sheet, which told them they needed to find signs of intelligent life somewhere. Around the hall were ten posters that looked like this:

The posters had the following characteristics:

• a shading of the radar dish (black, gray, or white)
• a color of the MIT logo (red, green, or blue)
• a number of the cyan underlines (one, two, or three)
• a style to the typography (plain, bold, or bold italic)

Using the five numbered logos and five other logos on the right, teams identified five additional logos that allowed them to create five more sets.

• Image 1 + fifth image on right + first image on poster 0
• Image 2 + third image on right + fourth image on poster 2
• Image 3 + fourth image on right + third image on poster 1
• Image 4 + first image on right + second image on poster 3
• Image 5 + second image on right + third image on poster 9

So solvers needed to prove intelligent life exists in zip code 02139. Once they did, to the satisfaction of the judges, they received Scotchy and Leah's Collectible Disaster Response Sheets, as well as a voucher for some handy dollarbucks.