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National Cipher Challenge

Trev

For anyone interested in learning about writing or decoding secret messages this is quite interesting:

www.cipherchallenge.org/

The ciphers used are mostly those in use prior to the Second World War.

There are tutorials on the website.

The target audience is A Level students and the prizes are for those registered through their school, however anyone can register and have a go at the ciphers (but you won't be eligible for the prizes).

It starts on Oct 9th, as I've had a go at it before I haven't decided yet if I'll do it again this year.

Edit: I just thought I'd add that you should be able to complete quite a few of the challenges by just using pen, paper and some online tools (the later challenges will need some simple computer programming)

Parents

  • I've decided this year I'll write my own code for statistical analysis of cipher text rather then using websites.

    Today I've done the code (in C) for reading some text from a file and displaying single letter frequency counts along with what one would expect in standard English next to it, with both listed from most common to least common (for example the letter E is most common and you would expect in most English text for 12.7% of the characters to be E).

    I've done enough for today, maybe tomorrow I'll start the code for bigram frequencies and trigram frequencies, ready for next week when the competition starts.

Reply

  • I've decided this year I'll write my own code for statistical analysis of cipher text rather then using websites.

    Today I've done the code (in C) for reading some text from a file and displaying single letter frequency counts along with what one would expect in standard English next to it, with both listed from most common to least common (for example the letter E is most common and you would expect in most English text for 12.7% of the characters to be E).

    I've done enough for today, maybe tomorrow I'll start the code for bigram frequencies and trigram frequencies, ready for next week when the competition starts.

Children
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