We have a lot of useful guides in the BOSS Library that teach you how to break various types of cipher, and some brilliant accounts from our BOSS recruits of how they tackled past challenges, but today we wanted to highlight something a little different. Crackerjack’s guide to coping when you can’t see what to do next.
If you have read our Cryptanalyst Handbook, you will have come across a quote from Robert Harris’s novel Enigma, all about the adventures of Jericho and his friends at Bletchley Park during the second world war. You may have seen the movie starring Dougray Scott and Kate Winslett. In the selected quote Jericho ruminates on the need “always to do something”. A code or cipher is rarely broken just by staring it down, so play with it, count things, re-arrange the letters. Just try things.
That is great advice as far as it goes, but it doesn’t help when you get completely and utterly stuck. And if you get to the last challenge of this competition I can promise that you will. The accounts of all our prize winners and medallists talk about that feeling, and Crackerjack’s excellent essay is an attempt to help you cope with it!
Thanks to Crackerjack.
Enjoy!
