The 8 × 8 array represents a chessboard, where each space is an image of a work of public art on the MIT campus. The 64 works can all be found on the List Art Center website (hence list in the flavortext).
The numbers in parentheses on each image indicate which letters to extract from the titles of the works (as given on the List site). These numbers are colored to match the spaces of the board they represent.
The puzzle describes six campus art tours, each of which is described by the types of art they visit:
- Works created by women
- Works created in 2010 or later
- Works in at least four colors
- Works installed west of Massachusetts Ave
- Works made of bronze
- Works with parentheses in titles
(Note that these are given in alphabetical order, implying that they are not in the final answer-phrase order.)
The puzzle mentions six campus tour guides by first name. Each is a famous person with a surname that is a chess piece:
- Ellery QUEEN
- Irene CASTLE
- Joey BISHOP (white)
- Billie Jean KING
- Maurice BISHOP (black)
- Doris PAWN
(Note that these are not given in alphabetical order, which is meant to suggest that they represent the ordering.)
Finally, the puzzle states the parameters that each tour is given by one tour guide, and visits at least four works of art.
Each of the six resulting art tours can be traced on the chessboard, starting at one of the indicated START squares, and following a path that meets two requirements:
- It follows the movement restrictions of one of the available chess pieces.
- It visits works of art that meet one of the given constraints.
By researching the works of art on the List Art Center site, solvers can determine these paths. No path has any ambiguity, once a piece has been assigned to it.
The following three chessboards show the six tours (plus a seventh knight’s tour that will be explained later).
| Ellery QUEEN | Works installed west of Massachusetts Avenue |
| Irene CASTLE | Works made of bronze |
| Joey BISHOP (white squares) | Works with parentheses in titles |
| Billie Jean KING | Works created by women |
| Maurice BISHOP (black squares) | Works in at least four colors |
| Doris PAWN | Works created in 2010 or later |
| KNIGHT |
| 21 | 2 | ♛ | 16 | 19 | 24 | 13 | 11 |
| 3 | 17 | 20 | 23 | 14 | 9 | 10 | 25 |
| 4 | 22 | 15 | 18 | 8 | 2 | ♜ | 12 |
| 4 | 5 | 5 | 7 | 4 | 3 | 26 | 3 |
| 3 | 4 | 6 | 6 | 5 | 4 | 11 | 28 |
| 2 | 7 | 3 | 5 | 10 | 27 | 2 | ♝ |
| ♟ | 2 | 9 | ♝ | 4 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
| 8 | ♚ | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | 4 | ♞ |
The following chessboard shows the tours, along with the titles of each work. The titles link to the List Art Center pages about each artwork.
Finally, the following chessboard shows the tours, along with the extracted letters of the works in each space.
| R | E | S | D | E | T | D | R |
| V | I | A | H | M | O | U | O |
| E | T | E | A | T | T | S | E |
| L | N | R | H | R | A | N | T |
| L | E | T | S | T | U | X | S |
| E | I | W | D | I | E | S | I |
| C | O | M | R | H | G | N | T |
| N | L | Y | E | I | T | H | A |
The letters in each tour spell a portion of an intermediate answer phrase:
| QUEEN | SEVENTH TOUR |
| CASTLE | STARTS |
| BISHOP (white squares) | IN THE |
| KING | LOWER |
| BISHOP (black squares) | RIGHT |
| PAWN | CELL |
This alludes to the missing piece, the knight, and thus to the “Knightâs Tour” problem.
The unused squares form an unambiguous knight’s tour, beginning in the lower right cell. This tour spells:
A STUDY IN MIXED MEDIA EARTH TONES
Searching for this description on its own will bring up as an early hit an origami work from 2004, which is an homage to the original “James Tetazoo” hack, a faux work of art with the same title. This earlier work appears on the Wikipedia page, Hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which is another Google hit. Searching for the answer phrase and MIT will bring up several links to descriptions of the original hack as well.
The answer to this puzzle is NO KNIFE.