I have not eaten for 48 hours because of 9B – Help!

[anonymous_chicken]

I believe I’ve decrypted 9B but keep getting 0%. Can the organisers confirm what format the submission should be in?
Raw Output, Cleaned English or something else?
Honestly I tried all various format and nothing helped.

Raw output please. We strip out non-alphabetic characters so spacing and punctuation won’t make a difference to your submission. If you can’t read the solution then it is probably wrong, though some ciphers use a padding character in places and we would expect to see them where they have been added in those cases unless we say otherwise. Harry
PS. Please eat.

[decrypting_donkey]

FUN FACT FOR HARRY!!!!! If he gives a clue, we will all be granted with sleep tonight!

As the Elves would tell you, that doesn’t work with Santa and it won’t work with Harry. But if you are all good and get to sleep early then Harry or Jodie might slip down the chimney and leave a not very helpful hint in the Case File in the morning. Harry

[Crackerjack_404]

@anonymous_chicken

Sometimes you can have cases where you might’ve submitted part of the solution and not the full plaintext. It could be worth checking that the length of your solution matches that of the ciphertext. You will also find eating something (ideally edible) helpful, can tell you from experience that ciphers are hard enough without doing them while running on fumes 🙂

[T]

I get a bit single minded like that sometimes, however every time I’ve worked on something for hours and feel like I’m going round in circles I find that after a break and something to eat it is almost always the case that I then work out a better, faster and more efficient way of solving the problem.

[upsidedown]

Speaking from many years’ experience, sleeping, eating, and taking a break to make a sandwich are all incredibly useful tools in your arsenal as a cryptanalyst. The first year I did the cipher challenge I figured out what type of cipher 10B was while cycling back from Thursday evening badminton.

Try to resist the temptation to stare at the ciphertext for hours at a time and you might just be rewarded with an insight while you’re doing the washing up.

[Author]

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