I know, Shakespeare \not = Dickens, but they are both great value for a quote and there is a bit of a literary theme to this year’s challenge. Speaking of which, we are all set here at CC Central for the formal launch of this year’s competition tomorrow at 3pm. Over 5000 of you have signed up already and we are hoping for a good many more over the next few weeks.
Challenges 1-3 are designated Practice rounds. You will get a mark and a certificate, and we will publish leader boards for each of them, but they do not count towards the final standings, which will only use your scores for Challenges 4-10. That means you have a little time to get yourself up to speed with the sort of skills you will need. If you are new to the competition you should probably take a look at Challenge 0 to see what a simple cipher looks like and to see how a cipher wheel can help to break it. Later challenges will be harder, some of them quite a bit harder, but this is as good a place to start as any. For the more experienced, we do not expect Challenge 1 to present any challenge at all (maybe we should call it something else?) but you probably still want to take a look, if only to catch the proper start of the story.
As usual you have a lot of time to submit and get full marks, so there is no need to rush at 3pm tomorrow. You can find the points schedule on the Challenge 1 page. For later challenges the time bands get a little shorter, but you usually have at least til the next morning to get full marks on each round. If our server is a little slow to respond at 3pm on Thursday it is just because of all the traffic, take a deep breath and give it a few minutes rather than rabidly reloading the page. You will just add to the problems if you do that!
We look forward to welcoming you tomorrow, good luck
