I don't know what the best thing was about Jim Propp's parties. They were different in so many ways from anything I'd ever seen. In high school, I burned through the get-drunk-in-a-friends-basement-while-his-parents-are-away parties. College brought the get-drunk-in-a-frat-basement-while-your-ears-bleed parties. Grad school brought... not a lot of partying; by then, I'd realized that I was kind of a nerd, and just didn't fit in to any of the party crowds I found in Seattle.

Cambridge, however, brought a revelation. Parked on Mass. Ave halfway between Harvard and MIT, I learned more than to embrace my inner nerd - I learned to wear nerdhood as a badge of pride, as a mark of my tribe. And my tribe had its own kind of parties.

Jim's parties were a crystalline picture of the specialized, rarified company we kept. Profs, postdocs and assorted academic keepsakes from the cream of Boston academia, piling into Jim's Victorian four-square house in Somerville for and evening of... well, we never quite knew what the evening would bring.

Technically, they were "word game" parties. Each was planned around a series of intellectual challenges arranged around the house more or less like dragons, axe-wielding dwarves or more mundane impediments in a typical game of D&D. You'd team up with a couple friends (or the pretty redhead who was probably dating one of your professors, if you could), and make your way from room to room, solving bits and pieces of puzzles that - if you were lucky - you could string together for the grand solution that tied them all together. The prize was bragging rights until the next party, six months down the line.

In any case, it all began with the invitation. Twice a year, a mysterious envelope would appear. Plain white, letter-sized, with a sheet or two of paper inside. I remember the first one I received: a single sheet with nothing but a swirling Spirograph flower on one side, and the letters "RSVP" below it. Where, when and how were left to the receipient, presumably after they had coaxed the secret out of the cryptic drawing.

Another time, the invitation was a short story, beginning something like "'I can't believe what a prick Jim is!' she said, throwing the invitation on the floor."  It self-referentially detailed an argument by a young couple that had received one of Jim's invitations and were exasperated at his expectation that they divine the details of the party from his little story. At the bottom, as always, it just said "RSVP".

Of course, if you couldn't solve the puzzle, there was always a last resort: you knew the puzzle was from Jim, so you could admit defeat and simply ask him when the party was. He'd likely take pity, and your secret was safe with him. But admitting that you'd been intellectually bested by the invitation was a humiliation no one was going to suffer lightly.

The party itself was a smorgasbord of puzzles. You could wander through the house, solving them in any order as you mingled, flirted and nibbled on hors d'oeurves, but you really had to try to solve all the puzzles. The reason was this: Jim wasn't usually content to simply think up a half dozen unrelated mind benders for us to pound our heads against. Usually (perhaps always?) there was something larger hidden behind the curtain - solutions for the individual puzzles were merely clues that needed to be strung together to solve a larger puzzle that we didn't even know existed.

Case in point: Jim's now-famous "Self-Referential Aptitude Test" (the SRAT) was a puzzle that was featured in one of Jim's parties from before the time I fell into his orbit. The test was composed (almost) entirely of questions whose answers depended on answers for other questions, beginning with

   1. The first question whose answer is B is question

      (A) 1, (B) 2, (C) 3, (D) 4, (E) 5

   2. The only two consecutive questions with identical answers are questions

      (A) 6 and 7, (B) 7 and 8, (C) 8 and 9, (D) 9 and 10, (E) 10 and 11

and getting more convoluted and twisted as it went.

Eventually, though, with enough patience - and perhaps a little experience in constraint-satisfaction programming - you'd come up with a self-consistent solution, and breathe a sigh of relief. But then what? How did solving this puzzle help you unearth, let alone solve, the master puzzle that was still hidden in the evening?

In this case, you might, just might have happened to write out the letters of the solution sequentially on a sheet of paper. If you did, you might have noticed that they spelled out a phrase. An odd one, I'll grant you, but it was clearly a clue (omitted here to preserve the puzzle), and with phrase in hand you had something carry you to the next room, and the next puzzle.

As you worked from puzzle to puzzle now, you could be alert for anything that would look like a phrase hidden in its solution. In this particular case, the phrase evoked a recent popular movie. Other puzzles referred, obliquely, to various aspects of Hollywood which, taken together revealed one common theme. To snatch the proverbial gold ring, all you needed to do was stroll up to Jim and announce the name of the mystery actress who was the common thread binding them together.

 

But that's all prelude. What's really on my mind is one particulary brilliant, if comically miscalculated puzzle that was intended to be the icebreaker at one of the last of Jim's parties that I attended.

When we arrived at the front door that evening, we were each required to take a name tag and write our name on it. Not a peculiar requirement in itself, given that most of us were strangers who knew Jim from only one of his many disjoint social circles. But what was peculiar was that each name tag already had on it a puzzling (there's that word again!) collection of words and letters.

One tag had, for example "Cretacious", "Run", "Carbon", and the letter "M". Another had "Spring", "Pius II", "Uranium", and "P". Yet another: "Pride", "Jurassic", "Hamlet", and "A".

Alone, or in pairs, they made little sense, but this clever crowd (remember: Harvard and MIT) quickly picked out the nature of the puzzle. What we had here were overlapping strands of partial orderings. Some people had geologic periods on their tags; they needed to be arranged in chronological order. Same with the popes and Shakespeare's plays. Elements in order of atomic weights, but others weren't so obvious. "Summer" comes before "Fall" (as does "Pride", we discovered), but where does the circle of the seasons wrap around?

The first thing that complicated this puzzle was that the sequences were carefully spread out, so there was no guarantee that you'd have a direct overlap with any particular person. I couldn't tell if Susan's tag ("Triassic", "Walk", "Macbeth" and "L") should be before mine ("Benedict I", "Nitrogen", "Hoover", "A") without discovering the mutual constraint imposed by Richard's tag ("Cretacious", "Run", "Carbon", "M").

That just left the matter of the letters, the only element common to everyone's tag. It was clear to everyone, then, that the letters must spell out the secret message.

Once the trick of the puzzle was guessed, the only thing that remained was to sort ourselves by whatever algorithm we self-organize while milling about the front rooms of Jim's house. But here was the unexpected problem: because the tags had been cleverly designed to make pairwise comparisons difficult, it wasn't straighforward for people to sort themselves by looking at their neighbors. We actually needed an algorithm.

Fortunately for us, a good fraction of the attendees were mathematicians and computer scientists, and understood sorting algorithms better than they understood some of the subtler aspects of personal hygene. Unfortunately, they were, again, predominantly Harvard and MIT professors, longing for that moment when their particular skills would be called on in an emergency, when they could just once utter that coveted phrase in a loud, authoritive but calm voice: "Stand back, everyone - I'm a computer scientist."

This would have been a brilliant opportunity, had there been but one such savior lurking in our midst. We would have stood there, willing minions, as he directed us through the dance of his polylogarithmic merge-sort algorithm: You there: step forward and work your way down the line. You, in the pink sweater, now it's your turn. And so on.

As cruel Fate would have it though (in retrospect, it was inevitable), there were at least a dozen such computational mavens waiting in the woodwork, each with their own algorithm to direct, and none willing to abdicate their long-dreamt-of moment in the sun. And so one would direct an innocent partygoer to switch places with her neighbor, immediately causing another to howl that the first was scrambling his already-sorted section of list.

It would be wrong to suggest that the computer scientists were the only ones at fault here. The English professors may not have known squat about algorithms, but they sure as hell knew that they weren't going to be ordered to silently stand in place and do-si-do with their partner on whim by scruffy kids half their age with mismatching shoes.

And so, all too quickly, things came off the rails. Voices were raised and veiled threats flew, involving tenure and the possibility of anonymous reviews. I don't think anyone actually threw a punch, but there were plenty of innocent bystanders cowering in the corner averting their eyes in the hushed whispers of refugees, lest anyone order them back in line between "Antimony" and "Zinc".

I don't actually know how long the game went on - they say that time dilates in train wrecks and other disasters - but it was probably close to an hour, and the party was clearly OVER before it had every really gotten started. Spouses grabbed coats and tugged their irate academicians, in full protest, to the door ("But we've almost gotten it solved!" "No dear, you've almost gotten punched in the nose.")

One of the remaining partygoers, unencumbered by a spouse, seized on this moment to throw his plan into action. Starting with the pretense that departing guests needed to leave their tags in his custody, he quickly fleeced the remaining partygoers of their tags as well. Many came off before their wearers had the chance to raise objections, and our young turk retreated to the back of the room in facing a crowd that was hostile, but weary and still vaguely curious whether the puzzle could be solved.

Now unattached to their hosts, the cards could sorted more quickly, so we held our tongues and reined in our acrimony, giving him a few minutes to try his hand at sorting out the riddle that had so spectacularly ruined not only this party, but possibly friendships and careers.

Slowly it took form, and slowly, the irony of the message that appeared before us sank in. It was a quotation from Grantland Rice, one that we all knew, and all knew far better than we had when the evening had begun:

 "He marks - not whether not whether you won or lost, but how you played the game."

(Copyright 2008, David Cohn) - the event described here probably happened in 1994 or 1995