By Peter Lorenz and Liz Chhouk

Based on the phrase IN FLUX, teams have determined that the orb is part of the flux capacitor that is part of Marty McFly’s DeLorean from Back to the Future.

When teams arrive at the interaction room (the “garage” where the DeLorean is kept), the car is missing! It seems that Doc Brown is away and Marty has taken the DeLorean for a spin and gotten himself stranded somewhere in the past, as indicated in the letter he left the team. The orb itself is still in the garage, but while the DeLorean is in use, the orb will be inaccessible due to being stuck in a constant state of flux.

Teams are presented with a demarcated floor area for building an “optical processor”. They are given three colored inputs (Red, Green, Blue), four colored outputs (Yellow, Blue, Green, Cyan), a “splitter” and two “mixers”, and a large number of colored dominoes.

Splitter:

Mixers:

Teams had to lay out the dominos so that when the dominoes at the input were pushed over, the dominoes at the outputs would be the right color. Dominoes were only allowed to hit other dominoes of the same color, except at mixers, where two primary colors of “input” would combine additively to produce one color of “output”, and at splitters, where a secondary color of “input” would split to produce two colors of “output”.

Detailed instructions, with diagrams, can be found here.

When teams successfully knocked over all their dominoes, the room monitors would press a button to unlock the Flux Capacitor and allow teams to view the core memory orb.

“Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News, the Back to the Future theme song, was played on repeat during this interaction.

The Team to Be Named Later

Setec Astronomy timelapse