A treasure hunt named Project Skydrop was recently run by creators Jason Rohrer and Tom Bailey. Unfortunately, the treasure has already been found, but I’ve been searching for the treasure with Monte Carlo simulations for the last 5 days. The true location of the treasure hasn’t been announced yet, but I believe I now know the rough location to within a km or so. So I’d like to share my methodology here because it was a fun data science-related project.
Public Clues
The treasure hunt is designed to show a radius around the true location that shrinks every day. There’s also some aerial drone pictures sent out as clues each day to paying members ($20 to join). And there’s some live camera snapshots of the treasure that get saved every 15 minutes that include temperature readings and can give hints about weather (rainy, cloudy, etc.). Lastly, it was known that the treasure is on public land not far from a hiking trail.
I focused my efforts on the shrinking circles because visually they seem to be converging on the true location in a potentially-predictable way. Here’s a plot of the circles.
Other Clues
At the time of writing, no one knows the true location other than 1) the guy who found it and 2) the game creators. But I’ve got a prediction for where it is that I believe is within 1 km or so. Before I discuss my methodology, I first have to share why I’m so confident that my model’s prediction is on track.
A reddit user found that a private plan registered to an aerial imaging company was circling overhead of a likely treasure location at exactly the moment the treasure was found (05:18:07 pm Tuesday, October 01, 2024). This is the flight radar: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/aircraft/n72rk#375a2bf9.
They were circling in the area of the treasure. I believe the true location was close to the summit of Country Hill, Montague, MA. This is the trail map of that area:
On a minor note, the latest drone photo looks to me like the treasure is near the peak of a hill (or maybe it’s just fisheye distortion, not sure).
My Prediction
My heatmap prediction of the true location was 42.561570220544596, -72.47556315509254, a bit north of the summit of Country Hill and right under the flight path of the plane mentioned above.
Here’s my actual heatmap (will explain how I generated below).
Methodology: Monte Carlo Simulation
Here’s a link to my Jupyter notebook with my code: Project Skydrop Monte Carlo Simulations.
(I’ll add explanations at a later date, but feel free to try to read the code.)
