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Christmas Crackers

The National Cipher Challenge is an annual competition organised by the University of Southampton’s Mathematics Department. Competitors have to work to break a series of codes, with points being awarded for accuracy and speed.

This year, Clifton College entered a team of nine students from Year 10: Alberto Perez Robledo (MH), Paul Song (WiH), Toby Dirnhuber (WaH), Manuel Fernandez (WaH), Nino Freuler (WaH), Ed Lee(WaH), John Morfopoulos (WaH), Dong Jae Hoang (NT) and Charlie Dowding (ST).

Beginning on Thursday 1 October 2009 and continuing over the next three months, the team had to solve the challenges of the Byron Enigma. This was a fictional story involving Charles Babbage and Byron’s daughter, Ada Lovelace, set against the historical machinations of British and French Intelligence, and Babbage’s invention of the Difference Engine, the precursor to the modern computer.

There were 16 challenges, ranging from simple Caesar Shift substitution ciphers, through to more complicated Vigenere and Jefferson ciphers. With the challenges being released at 3.15pm on Thursday afternoons, the team had to use a variety of computing tools and good old-fashioned ingenuity to solve the problems as quickly and accurately as possible. Charlie Dowding in particular, showed great insight to spot a code disguised in binary, while Toby Dirnhuber proved adept at manipulating Excel spreadsheets to eke out clues. All of the team contributed in spotting patterns and potential leads and what was particularly impressive was that for many of them English is not their first language.

Going into the final week’s challenge, the team had successfully cracked all the ciphers, and were on maximum points alongside fifty other teams from different schools. A potential issue arose, with the last challenge being released on December 17th, after the end of term. However, some of the team were able to make it into school, and with the others connecting remotely from France, Austria, Poland and Spain, they were all ready to begin work at 3.15 GMT. Three hours and fifteen minutes later, the challenge had been completed, and all sat back to wait the two weeks over Christmas till the final results were published.

The Clifton team ended up finishing first equal on points, alongside 27 other teams. To differentiate, the organisers compared the times taken to submit the solution to the final challenge, and, in an indication of the strength of the competition, they were placed as 16th quickest. As there were almost 1,200 teams who entered from across the country, this was a marvellous achievement, and the team was entirely deserving of their success.

27 January 2010

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