As we enter the last half an hour before the launch of the final competition challenge there are 158 teams still on full points and, as far as we can tell, 145 of them eligible for prizes. Will one or more of them crack Challenge 10B before 9pm tonight? If so they are in with a chance of one our main prizes! If not then perhaps someone outside current joint first place will beat them to it! There are plenty of points available, and the first time band runs until 9pm tonight. Sharpen your pencils and your brains and stand by for action.
Even if you are one of those who get there first, you are not guaranteed a prize – we only have a few to award – so be ready to share how you broke the cipher with us. We will be in touch to ask you to send us all the code you used, hopefully commented to help us understand it, together with a short essay explaining: how you tackled it; what blind alleys or wrong turns you took; what brilliant moments of insight you had and what triggered them; what processes you undertook to crack it open. We don’t mind how you write it, but it needs to be all your work (no AI please!) and to show us that the break was also all the work of you, and if relevant your team mates. You will need to include the name, age and school of all your team members and to certify that you are eligible for a prize within the rules.
We expect to take accounts like this from around 20 to 30 submissions in order to select the handful or prize winners, so being asked to submit an account is not an guarantee of being a prize-winner, but you are certainly likely to be invited to Bletchley if you get that far and that is a worthy prize in itself!
As we said before, it is not all about winning, so please don’t be disappointed if we don’t ask you to write an account of your ingenious attack on our final challenge. We would still love to hear something about it. Perhaps when the competition is over you would like to write something for the website that we could post next year. We would love to hear from you.
