Welcome to the XVIth National Cipher Challenge

[Anonymous]

Its good to have you back if we have met you before, and great to welcome you if you haven’t. The forum is a place to hang out and discuss anything related to the Challenge and quite a few things that are not. (It is a sort of virtual version of the Mathematical Sciences Student Centre that we have here at Southampton.)

There are not many house rules.
Be kind – people on the web are still people and have feelings.
Don’t write anything you wouldn’t be proud to be associated with. Most people don’t know who you are, but some do!
Don’t publish solutions or hints without clearing them with Harry first! It ruins the competition for everyone. (And don’t think you will get away with publishing them somewhere else on the web either. Harry can use Google too!)
Do tell us your best maths jokes. There aren’t many good ones, but you will get a very receptive audience here.
Also challenge us with your best maths puzzles, but don’t try to publish encrypted messages as Harry and the Elves will assume they contain something scurrilous and block them!
Be polite to the Elves. They have a lot to do and are trying their best to support you by running the forum.
Have fun!
Harry

[Anonymous]

thnks hazza ya absolute geeza

[Anonymous]

I am so excited to be doing this challenge again this year. I had exams last year when this challenge was out and I couldn’t do more than 3 challenges. But I am happy to be back!

[Anonymous]

Who was the only mathematician to sit with King Arthur at the round table? Sir Cumference.

[Anonymous]

I’ve sent a team member the link for joining my team. How do I accept his join request? I don’t see a message in the team/details menu and I haven’t received an email from the site.

[Anonymous]

You should have received an email, but it comes from a donotreply@ address so might have been put in junk or spam – have a look in all the places it could have been mistakenly sent by your email system.

If that doesn’t turn it up, double check that this site has the correct email address for you. If there’s still no joy, do let us know, and we’ll see if we can work out what happened!

[Anonymous]

No problem, I’ve accepted the request now. (the email was in the spam folder)

[Anonymous]

Congratulations; you have accomplished everything you need to in life hahahaha. And say hi to Sir Cumference and tell him to stop eating too much pi.

[Anonymous]

Are we allowed to use libraries in our code, e.g. a library for c that puts spaces between words by comparing them to a dictionary or something when writing programs to solve these ciphers?

[Anonymous]

what is the 1st challenge marked out of

[Anonymous]

For Challenge 1, 6 is max number of marks for timing, and 100% is the maximum accuracy.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 6 months ago by .

[Anonymous]

I would tell you the joke about the broken compass, but there’s no point to it!

[Anonymous]

hey, what is the max amount of points you can get on one question

[Anonymous]

The number of points available varies depending on the challenge. For Challenge 1, 6 is max number of marks for timing, and 100% is the maximum accuracy.

[Anonymous]

For challenge B in part 1, does it really matter about the time, or is it more about the accuracy? Also, will you lose points if your answer is not 100% accurate?

[Author]

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