MIT Hackathon Puzzle That Turned Into a Data Science Project

How a face-customization puzzle at HackMIT went from clicking sliders by hand to reverse-engineering a hidden formula from 10,000 API calls. Face Value looked simple at first glance: ten sliders (Face, Skin, Hair, Brows, Eyes, Nose, Mouth, Glasses, Mole, Accessory), each 0-9, controlling a cartoon avatar. A hidden model scored every configuration, and the goal was to find one it would fully accept : Confidence ≥ 99.9% Edit distance from the starter config ≤ 5 (only half the sliders could move) Charm check: pass Sync check: pass The puzzle's own hint: "Not all features affect the model equally. Some are more sensitive than others, especially together. Single-feature sweeps can be misleading." That warning turned out to be the whole game. Phase 1: Brute Force by Hand The first instinct is the obvious one: click a slider, hit Query, read the result, adjust, repeat. Every query returned four numbers, shown together in a Reviewer panel: Probability, Charm, edit Distance, and Sync. All four had to align at once. This works, sort of. Over the first ~24 manual queries, real patterns emerged: certain Glasses values seemed to matter for Sync, Mole and Accessory nudged confidence up, some sliders had sharp peaks rather than smooth slopes. But progress plateaued hard around 60-77% confidence . Manual testing can only really explore one or two dimensions at a time, and the puzzle explicitly warned that the model cared about combinations ; you can't discover a 3-way interaction by changing one slider and squinting at the result. The first real breakthrough was small but important: after enough fiddling, one query came back with Sync: True for the first time, confidence still low (8.14%), but proof that the four conditions weren't mutually exclusive. Phase 2: Escaping the UI The turning point was popping open Chrome DevTools, clicking Query once, and grabbing the actual network request as a curl command. Underneath the slick UI was a plain JSON API: POST https://facevalue.hackmit.