September 30, 2005
Scoring and rule changes
Lots of you are worried about the scoring for the first challenge part B, especially given the problems you had submitting. The marking scheme is complicated, but will take those problems into account. In this entry we will (try to) explain the scoring system and outline two rule changes designed to discourage the sort of multiple submission frenzy that slowed everything down yesterday.What you need to know is that we give you two marks for each Challenge B, one for accuracy and one for speed. To do this we look at your most accurate submission and give it a score for accuracy out of 100. Then we look at the time you submitted that version and give it a mark for speed. If you submit the same solution multiple times we will (from Challenge 2 onwards - this is our first rule change) use the last copy we receive in assessing your speed. This is to discourage multiple rapid fire submissions which would in fact slow you down.
In week one the mark for speed will be out of five, with a mark of 5 for a submission on September 29th or 30th , 4 for a submission on October 1st and so on with a mark of 1 for submitting on October 4th or 5th. Your overall mark in Challenge 1B will therefore look like (x%, y) with a maximum of (100, 5), and we will compare these using the dictionary order so that a score of (100, 5) beats everything, (70, 5) is beaten by (80, 5) and (70,5) beats (70, 4). [Note added: (80,1) beats (70,5)] Other part B challenges will be marked in a similar way, though the number of marks available for speed increases as the Challenge gets harder and we distinguish by smaller time periods, part day, hours or minutes rather than by the day. We combine your marks in the part B challenges to produce the final rankings. The outcome is that being delayed by even several hours yesterday will not affect your position in the final table. Of course you can all think of much better schemes, but I'm afraid this is not open to debate or discussion, and I hope we can agree that it is fair.
For the part A challenge we will give you a mark out of 100 for your best submission and speed will not matter.
The second rule change is that we will disqualify anyone who makes an unreasonable number of submissions. In the first instance this will mean that anyone who submits more than 20 times in 10 minutes will be open to disqualification, so go easy on the submit button! Given our scoring scheme you don't need to hammer at it like a woodpecker at a tree, and you are more likely to get a response from the server if you don't wear it out.
Posted by Harry at 04:42 PM | Comments (23)
HINT
Stuck on the first Challenge? Here are some hints to help.
1. If you look at "Challenge 0" which introduced the story you will see that the Captain suggests to me that we should use a particular type of cipher. Look it up on the web if you don't know what it is. That makes it a lot easier to tackle part A.
2. Cryptographers often look for a "crib", i.e., a part of the message whose content you can guess. In the case of part A you will see that its layout is very similar to the layout of Challenge 0 part A, and that might help you to figure out what it says. Given that and the knowledge of the type of cipher used you should be able to crack part A easily.
3. Part B is tougher, since we don't have a crib, but you could try the easy ciphers first. There are two ways to tackle it. One is to try all teh cihers you can think of one at a time and see if any give a message which makes sense. A cleverer way to tackle it is to figure out which letter occurs most often in the text, since this is likely to stand for the letter e. Once you know that you can use the shape of words (single letter words are likely to be a, three letter words ending in e are probably the and so on) to help break the code. Good luck,
Posted by Harry at 01:59 PM
Submission feedback
Once we have dealt with the aftermath of yesterday afternoon we will be sending out email confirmatin and feedback. Could we ask you to be patient about this as we can't automate the replies until we have cleaned the database. Thanks.
Posted by Harry at 08:51 AM
September 29, 2005
Dead server
You killed it! Some people (you know who you are, and so do we!) pressed the submit button so many times (in one case several hundred times) that the database gave up and went home. THose of you who got a message about the date being wrong just saw the departing ghost of the machine. It restarted pretty quick, but we are sorry for the inconvenience. Things have calmed down a little now.
Posted by Harry at 04:35 PM
News feeds
I forgot to mention, as well as the news feed for the latest challenge there is a feed for the boat's log so you can get updates fed right to your desktop in your favourite newsreader.
Posted by Harry at 02:29 PM | Comments (4)
Submitting your solution
All solutions should be submitted using the form on the submit entry page, do not email them to us unless you absolutely have to (if our website dies under the strain for example!) Email submissions are dated at the time we receive them so you could lose valuable time submitting by email unnecessarily and it makes it hard for us to process the submissions. Please fill in the entry form carefully. If you think you have made a mistake after submitting you can submit again. We will always use your best answer for your final score for each Challenge. Good luck to everyone,
Posted by Harry at 02:21 PM | Comments (22)
More broken email addresses
The following teams/individuals have givn us an email account which is bouncing messages. Could you check your email account is working, your mailbox is not full and so on, and then check your registration is OK by visiting this page. Let us know if you are having problems.
Posted by Harry at 02:13 PM | Comments (0)
Getting the Challenge
When the website goes live at 4pm this afternoon with Challenge 1 there will be a lot of traffic and you may find it hard to get in. There are ways to reduce the problem. Why not try using the following link to download a text file containing both parts of the Challenge. In theory at least this will be quicker than waiting ofr graphics to load and will help our server to cope. Alternatively we provide an RSS feed which contains text files of the Challenges (when they are given as text files) and links to any needed additional files. You can subscribe to this feed using a news aggregator like Omea or Bloglines in WIndows, Safari or NetNewsWire in Mac OS X or Akregator or Liferea for Linux. The disadvantage with this is it might take a few minutes for the updated rss to propogate, but it does give you a second route to the challenges.
Posted by Harry at 12:12 PM
September 28, 2005
Registration emails bounced
The teams listed in the extended version of this note all gave email addresses which bounced our confirmation message. It may be that your mailbox is full or that you mis-typed the email address. Could you log in and use the form on this page to check your details and amed the email address if necessary. Thanks
Bouncing email addresses:
KSC Cryptos
maz and posy
BERNARD4
Dominator
HMF
Teza
THE Code Crackers!
The Angels
penguins
CR4CK3R5
Bilal
ok-go
E_UNIT
Crackingcodecrackers
The_Pictograms
bob
mosses
Mi$$_Giggle$
the maths eagle
Swordfish
Giant Purple Puffer Fish Rock
8 inch oblong
tippy toppy team
Andrew KC
brainy
FuseBox
hello dave
celtic
coolers
John Collins
Phat pidgeon! W00t!
Maths
smegheads
Classy Birds
Superstar
Audenshaw Armada
tn team
tomba
Rainbow
fire
Duncan Tarrant
Schorpe's Bandits
Dean Davis
Bang
The Hair Bare Bunch
Cipher Challengers
pimp select
Weeblmeister
Catastrophe
Honey and Bee
Cyberpunks
gemmalawson
Sercan
brainiacs
Posted by Harry at 03:52 PM
September 27, 2005
Registration problem
We had a problem with the registration server this lunchtime. If you tried to register and failed you could try again now. If the problem persists for you then email me your registration details at cipher@soton.ac.uk and we will enter the details for you.
Posted by Harry at 02:15 PM
September 26, 2005
Timing
In order to upload the first Challenge we will take the website down at 3.00 on Thursday. It will come back up at 4pm the same day with the first Challenge in the cipher room. All the best,
Posted by Harry at 02:30 PM | Comments (6)
September 23, 2005
Comments
Starting with this entry we will try allowing comments. You will need to post an email address to leave a comment, and we need to approve it before it will appear. Please act responsibly. No personal or inappropriate comments should be made. Don't say anything here you wouldn't say in front of a teacher, or that you wouldn't want said to you; it is a very public place. Criticisms or concerns should be emailed directly to us here, particularly if you think we should not have posted a particular comment. (Though glowing praise will nearly always be posted for all to see.) Hints about the challenges may be blocked or held back at our discretion so don't try to publish hints about the keyword to a cipher ten minutes after we post the Challenge, and definitely don't try to tell the world what the solution is. They will find out how clever you were to crack it in 28 seconds flat when we publish the leader board. We reserve the right to refuse to publish comments without entering into a discussion about why, and to censor comments as we see fit. Finally, though we would like to, we can't be awake 24 hours reading the comments, so please be patient if it takes a while for your comments to be approved.
Posted by Harry at 05:35 PM | Comments (39)
The poster
If you need it for a school newsletter (or for anything else) you can download a jpeg of this year's Challenge poster:
Poster jpeg
Posted by Harry at 04:05 PM
September 22, 2005
It's free
Just to confirm, entry to the competition is free. We have been generously sponsored by the government research funding body EPSRC under their Public Partnerships for Awareness campaign and prizes are sponsored by IBM, Southampton University School of Mathematics and by Trinity College, Cambridge so all it costs you is your time.
Posted by Harry at 04:20 PM
September 21, 2005
Registration
Just a reminder, if you registered and didn't get an email from us it could be that there is a problem with your email address. We have had several confirmation emails bounced either because a mailbox is full or because the email address was mistyped. If that could be you please look again. If you need to edit your registration (to change the email address or for any other reason) then use the form at the following link Edit your registration
You will need to use your username and password so please keep them safe. If you forget your password then we can email it to you again if you click on the following link, though this will only work if we have a correct email address for you!
Forgotten password
Posted by Harry at 08:16 PM
September 20, 2005
The youngest competitor?
David reminded us that last year Laura managed several of the early stages of the competition aged 8.
Posted by Harry at 08:32 AM
September 19, 2005
Questions:
Q: What age group is the Challenge aimed at?
A: We have had pupils as young as ten and as old as eighteen taking part (if you know of someone even younger, let us know). The competition starts easy, so everyone can tackle the early challenges, together with the part A challenges, which are supposed to be easier than part B.
Q: Can a school enter more than one team?
A: You can enter as many teams and/or individuals as you wish, though we do ask that each person belongs to just one entry.
Any questions? Email us.
Posted by Harry at 08:19 PM
September 18, 2005
Registration problems?
We had some minor problems with the registration page over the last few days. If you tried to register and did not receive the confirmation email could you try again. If that gives you problems then email us and we'll check whether you are registered or not. All the best
Posted by Harry at 07:32 PM
September 17, 2005
Thanks to Jason Bell
... who noticed a problem with the homepage, debugged it and sent us a corrected version! All well beyond the call of duty and much appreciated. If you do spot problems let us know using the "email us" link at the top of the page. Thanks,
Posted by Harry at 04:36 PM
September 16, 2005
Posters
The poster for this year's Challenge should be arriving in your school in the next few days. If it doesn't turn up by Wednesday let me know.
Posted by Harry at 02:50 PM
September 14, 2005
Welcome to the fourth National Cipher Challenge
The School of Mathematics at the University of Southampton, together with its partners, IBM, GCHQ, EPSRC, Bletchley Park, EducationGuardian and Trinity College Cambridge, would like to welcome you to the the fourth annual National Cipher Challenge. Join me on the submarine Michael5 as I try to decipher strange messages from the deep. The site will be growing and changing over the next two weeks in the runup to the competition, so come back regularly for updates.
If you want to get started with code breaking and can't wait for the Challenge to begin you can download some notes/lesson plans here.
Posted by Harry at 01:36 PM | Comments (2)