King Edward’s School win 10th National Cipher Challenge
A team of Year 13 pupils from King Edward’s School, Bath has won the 10th National Cipher Challenge.
The National Cipher Challenge is a national code-breaking competition run by Southampton University with 1800 teams from across the country taking part. The challenge is sponsored by a number of companies including IBM, GCHQ and Netcraft.
The winning Year 13 team consisted of Sam Udale-Smith, Nas Andriopoulos, George Timbrell and Will Neaverson.
Students were given a series of codes to decipher between September and December, with the complexity of the encryption increasing at each stage. The final code, received in December, was a message encrypted using music which the students managed to crack on the final afternoon of term, Thursday 15th December, 2011.
The four Year 13 pupils have been invited to the prize-giving at Bletchley Park on Friday 30th March. They will have lunch with the sponsors and enjoy an afternoon of lectures given by code-breaking luminaries and receive the first prize award of £1000.
Congratulations also go to the Year 12 team of James Wright, Rory McTeague, David Galazin, Nic Prettejohn, Cameron Berry and Will Locke who came a very creditable 11th in the overall standings.
David Middlebrough, Maths teacher, commented:
“Congratulations to all the students, this is a wonderful achievement. The teams enjoyed the opportunity to follow in the footsteps of the great code-breakers at Bletchley Park and this success is a credit to the intelligence and determination of the students involved”