:(

[tahausman]

harry you’re such a meanie why is there NUMBERS now

Harry is a mathematician. Count yourself lucky that he didn’t throw in some greek letters to make things interesting! Jodie

[Crackerjack_404]

Now that I think about it, it would actually be interesting given the number of letters in the Greek alphabet…

[cipher_breaker]

☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹

[decrypting_donkey]

In Greek there are 4 letters missing: J Q V W. 52 – 4 = 48 = 24 x 2 = number of empty squares in case files 10.6. Am I onto something, no idea. I’ve lost all hope now

[decrypting_donkey]

Harry, Jodie, and all the elves. I know this is a big ask, but please consider it. Lots of schools in my area end after 3:00 (3:15-3:30), and we are always late to the challenge. I understand this isn’t the biggest deal but I believe those extra few minutes could help us, and I also believe we could be further up the leader board if we started a bit earlier. Is there any way the challenge could start at 3:30, or maybe a system where your time took to complete the challenge is estimated based on when you first went onto the challenge page. Even if you can’t do it, I understand, please don’t feel pressured. Thanks

Thanks for suggesting this. We know that school finish times vary a lot across the country and that does cause some frustration. Unfortunately moving the start time doesn’t fix that it just changes who is affected. While it would be great to get a relative time score by starting the timing when you download the challenge I am afraid that opens an entire can of worms. I wouldn’t want to traduce our lovely competitors, but I suspect more than one would quickly figure out that they could gain points by having a dummy account to download the challenge, solve it then log in using their main account to “download” it again in order to speed run the solution. We tried coming up with variations like customised ciphertext or keys, but since a large part of the challenge lies in figuring out what on earth is going on we can’t really reduce the impact of that. Hence the same start time for everyone. HOWEVER, and it is a HUUUUGE “however”. For all the rounds except the last one the start time is not really key. The first time band lasts until 11pm on Friday and gives everyone a fair shot at meeting it. Even if you are delayed for an hour on Thursday you can catch up on quick-start competitors in the rest of that period. There will be de cases where a team narrowly misses out on full marks, but that can happen for other reasons like network problems too and we can’t (despite our very best efforts) come up with a better, fairer system than the current one.

The one remaining objection might be that the final challenge has much tighter time bands and that penalises those who have other commitments on the final Thursday. We understand that, but by that stage everyone knows what is at stake and has to decide what to prioritise.

All of which is to say that while we understand your pain, and do not take it lightly, we have tried to build a fair scoring system, and after 24 years think it has evolved to something as close to that as possible! Hope you understand, and if you do have a genius idea addressing all the issues we would LOVE to hear it.

All the best, Harry

[S_D_10Br]

@decrypting_donkey, in response to your message about the Greek alphabet, it is actually a lot more complicated and nuanced. Although some phonetics can be related pretty reasonably (alpha-a, beta-b, gamma-g…) there are actually more letters that don’t appear and some letters that seem to appear more than once, would eta or epislon be an e? Does kappa relate to C or K (I’d say K but we can’t be sure)? What the heck is a psi? For this reason, I believe it would be difficult to incorporate Greek letters in modern ciphers (as compared to the ancient Greeks, I know it’s technically called classical cryptography) without it being maths related or the plaintext being in Ancient Greek.
P.S sorry for this reply is so late, I just read the post

[AES_of_spades]

I really do think Thursday at 3:00 is an inconvenient time for most! Why cant you start it at 5pm or something and keep everyone happy?

The answer is that it wouldn’t keep everyone happy! There are a number of schools and individuals for whom 3-4:30 is a good time to run after school clubs and some competitors who rely on their school internet for access. If we don’t release the challenges until 5pm they would be very disadvantaged. With the exception of Challenge 10 no-one is disadvantaged by the 3pm start, and anyone who is in the running for a prize at that stage should be able to convince their school to let them get started then. There really is no perfect time (or we would have found it over the last 24 years) so we will continue with the best compromise we can find. Sorry, Harry

[BobD]

The current timing would appear to me to be optimal: especially when considering the use with “after-school” clubs and bearing in mind the generous first deadline for all but Challenge 10. Being able to start after their last lesson had finished at 15:45 was never a problem for my students, some of whom had managed to somehow crack the earlier rounds before the end of school?!!

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