The Prizegiving at Bletchley Park

On May 7th 2004 there will be a Prizegiving ceremony at Bletchley Park to celebrate the achievements of all the particpants in this year's National Cipher Challenge. Prizes will be awarded by our sponsors from IBM UK and GCHQ. Our special guest for the afternoon is Clifford Cocks celebrated UK cryptologist and discoverer of what came to be known as RSA encryption, the most well known public key cryptographic system. We are delighted to announce that there will be a lecture by Claire Ellis, formerly director of Simon Singh's school Enigma project and now education director at Bletchley. The programme of events will begin at 1.45pm and run until approximately 5pm and will include an opportunity to tour the museum. Last year's event was a lot of fun and we hope as many of you as possible can make it. The event is generously sponsored by Bletchley Park, and a limited number of FREE tickets for the afternoon will be available to schools or individuals appearing on the Cipher Challenge Hall of Fame. These are available on application, first come first served, using the online application form which may be found at /registration/tickets

Winners, prizes etc.

Congratulations to the overall winner and IBM Cipher Challenge Champion, 2004, David Simner of Nottingham High School. Some of you will remember that David was the Champion last year as well, and no doubt will be relieved to hear that he will be too old to compete again next year!

The committee was very impressed by the efforts of everyone who cracked Challenge 8 and decided to award two runners up prizes, one to the team Universally Challenged (Nick Purdon, Spiros Adams-Florou, Chris Braun, Alastair MacLellan) from King Edwards High School in Bath, and another to Yanmei Chen of St. Anne's Convent School.

The fifty pound prize winners this week are:

The Whizz Kidz (Paul Tinton, Gavin Williams) from Bishop Rawstorne C Of E Language College,
Year 11 Sda1 (Carmen Pun, Queenie Leung, Candy Sin) from St. Dunstan's Abbey School
The Frogs (Frances Bennett) from Bedford High School,
Sarson Bros (Jon Sarson, Will Sarson) from Gillotts School /Reading School,
Abhilash Sarhadi from King Edward's School

The following entrants will win an autographed copy of Practical Cryptography by Niles Ferguson and Bruce Schneier:

James Lloyd of Portsmouth Grammar School
Paul Jeffreys of Berkhamsted Collegiate School
The Two Cipherers (Colin and Duncan Love) of Hampton Community College,
Jonathan Lee of Nottingham High School
Marlwood Cracker (Andrew Ryrie) of Marlwood Secondary School

In addition everyone in a team appearing in the top 234 places on the final Leader Board (that makes the top 500 individuals down to and including Melanie Page of St Anne's Convent School) will receive a Cipher Challenge badge, sponsored by GCHQ the real-life codebreakers who work with British intelligence services. They are always looking for talented mathematicians and (particularly) programmers, and have undergraduate schemes that you may wish to look at. They have a website at www.gchq.gov.uk.

IMPORTANT: If you have qualified for one of these prizes and your team has not registered a contact address with us (one per team please - all prizes will be sent to that one address) you should go to the registration page and do so as soon as possible.

Solution Eight

Well that's it! Congratulations to all of you, and especially to those who tried every Challenge, I know the last one was particularly tough and even if you didn't get it quite right, or got stuck half way through it was still an amazing achievement to get that far.

You can find the solution to Challenge 8 posted in the Journal. Al that is left is for us to announce the winners for this stage and of the overall Championship prize. Remember that we will decide the overall prize based on the submission times for all the Challenges. The committee will be meeting this week and we will be announcing the winner some time next week. Watch this page for news.

Equally important, we want to announce the date of the National Cipher Challenge Prize-giving ceremony at Bletchley Park. This will be held on May 7th and as last year will include a guest lecture, and a tour of the museum. Schools and individuals will be able to apply for tickets which will be free, courtesy of our sponsors, Bletchley Park itself. The event was very popular last year and we may need to ration tickets. Details will be published here on Thursday 22nd January, and also will be emailed to participants. If you wish to be contacted about the day and are not registered for the competition please register now.