[raja7890]

Perhaps, once the tale is told in full it will all make sense?

[raja7890]

Because we are not as good at art as we are at torturing you?

[raja7890]

(rubs hands)

I know.

Evil, isn’t it!

[raja7890]

You know when you can’t get a cryptic clue for the crossword, but when someone explains it you can sort of see what it was getting at? No? You will do with this:

Good luck,

Harry

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by raja7890.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by raja7890.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by .

[raja7890]

A minor typo. It shouldn’t make a difference to your decrypt. Hope that helps.

[raja7890]

Do you fancy writing a page or two about how you cracked this one, and maybe describing the code you wrote for it, maybe as pseudocode? We would love to publish it on the site next year to encourage others. Harry

[raja7890]

Shakespeare? Boring bits? I absolutely love the comedies!

[raja7890]

Are you still loving the challenge? 8B is a bit of a beast this year!

[raja7890]

Pretty much the case. Speed of solving Challenge 8B also matters. Candidates for the overall prizes usually have full marks on Challenge 3 to 7 and we then look at those to see who is provided the fastest correct solutions For Challenge 8B to select candidates for the prizes. We ask those candidates to provide a bit of information about how they broke the ciphers and then the prize committee makes a recommendation for the awards. Hope that helps,

Harry

[raja7890]

Four things are, I hope, true:

1. You will get a lot more out of the competition if you do the work yourself!
2. There is a grey area: Clearly you don’t have to write your own operating system, but using an online cracker (and I am afraid they do exist) to break the challenges is well beyond what is acceptable in the spirit and letter of the rules.
3. We try to be fair about this.
4. No-one has ever won the competition by using an online cracker! (In any case we ask winners to show us their working and we are looking for independence when we look.)

All the best,

Harry

• This reply was modified 7 years, 5 months ago by .

[raja7890]

That’s a bit like asking “Who is M?”

[raja7890]

Thanks Aliman, the system tries to enforce wrapping so this might be a browser issue. Do you want to email us details of the system and browser you are using so we can look into it?

Thanks again,

Harry

[raja7890]

Thanks Aliman, we couldn’t see the screenshot bu we think we have diagnosed and fixed the problem. Let us know if not.

All the best,

Harry

[raja7890]

You can get your certificates from the Answers tab under the user account (top right of the home page).

All the best, Harry

[raja7890]

Whoops, there is a timezone issue that we missed! (Actually we noticed this for Challenge 1 and finessed it by putting the “wrong” time in, but forgot to do that this time. Apologies for confusion, but the time bands for points are still wide and welcoming, so hopefully no-one was adversely affected. Thanks for pointing it out,

Harry

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