Those unexpected words: "Undress the manikin!"

A few weekends ago, I went with some of my friends to an 'Escape Room' here in Budapest. This is a very local thing, a phenomenon that makes total sense with a culture so steeped in (and skilled at) mathematics, logic, and problem solving*.

It goes like this: you get a group of 2-5 friends and find a little hole-in-the-wall Escape Room (sometimes called Trap Room) place. The person at the desk welcomes you in quietly, asks which room you want to visit or asks for your reservation number. You answer, and the group files into a dusky room, usually in a basement, usually with strange things painted on the walls - dusty, rusty, strange things hanging around the room. Barrels. Rope. Broken mirrors. Piles of clothing. Old photographs. And the man from the counter sees everyone is inside, says "You have one hour," and shuts the door. You hear it lock. You have one hour to figure out how to open the door again.

And you find your way out! It might be small mathematical calculations from strange diagrams painted on the walls, getting a cork out of a wine bottle with only a rag, finding a marble in a dusty corner that then becomes a vital part of a contraption to free a tiny key from a glass box -- clues are hidden around the room and hopefully after an hour, you have opened every possible part of the room (in the case of the one that I did, there were several rooms contained in one, and you had to thoroughly explore all three to find the key code to re open the original door). And our group - fantastically mixed, by the way. It's good to have people who are good at different things, and we had exactly that. Math people and non math people, tall people, small people, creative people, determined people. It was perfect. Everyone did something to help the group. And boy, did it teach you to think of everything as important and worthy of investigation.

At one point, the person who could watch our attempts to get out through the camera in the ceilings of room noticed our time was running out and that we were attempting something fruitless and said those words over the loudspeaker:"Undress the manikin!" We had rifled through the manikin's clothes, found various clues in them, but none of us had dared to undress him completely! I will never look at manikins the same way again. A few of the people in this group are fellow students and when we're stuck on a problem, we've taken to saying that to each other as an expression of being at a loss for what to do next.

I hope to go back and do that again sometime soon, maybe with some different people. I can build my team with care. :) I think it's a brilliant idea, this type of thing. If it were perfect for me, it would also involve a rope climb, or a complex pulley system where we had to lift our team members up - something physical. I feel it's a shame that we don't really use our bodies anymore. Not for real things. Even the gym feels fake and mechanical. Helping someone move, helping in a garden, raking the lawn - I love those things. I just wish they could be incorporated into my daily life more - in a natural way. (I think I'll be one of those wirey sixty-year-olds who bikes to work even in pouring rain...)

All in all, though, a brilliant thing to be able to do. I hope to participate in several more and get myself out of many other locked rooms before this semester is over.

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*I realized tonight after listening to some fellow students that "problem solving" is a misleading phrase when spoken by mathematicians (or wanna-be mathematicians) to mixed audiences. Here are a few "problems" the way I (we?) use the word: 1. Consider a square constructed by 8x8 smaller tiles, each square in shape (i.e. like a chess board). If one tile is removed from the upper left hand corner of the board and one from the lower right hand board, is it possible to cover the rest of the board in dominos (with no overlaps or pieces hanging off the edge), given that a domino covers two adjacent tiles? 2. How many strictly increasing integer sequences begin with 1 and end with 1000? As you can see - not real life problems. We're as good at those as the rest of you.