raja7890
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raja7890
ParticipantBut surely this is the perfect medium?
ParticipantThanks for brining this up, it could be a bug (this is the first large scale test we have been able to do of the new Leader Board system. We will look into it and get back to you.
ParticipantWe are on this and think we have squished the bug. Apologies. Thanks for pointing it out.
ParticipantWe had to take old competition sites down as we could no longer afford to maintain them. We are hoping to find a way to resurrect them in the future, but I am afraid, for now, they are gone. Some people have had luck finding past challenges on the fabulous internet Wayback Machine, so you could try that.
On team mapping, we are looking into it. We have tried to reduce the amount of data we store about you this year, and in particular do not have school postcodes. While it is easy to figure out where the Eton and Fettes registrations come from, you would be amazed at how many King Edwards or St Annes there are across the UK. (Actually, reading that back, I would be amazed if there are any, I was referring to School names, not current monarchs). That makes it hard to nail down the geographic location of entrants. We can do rough location on an international scale by resolving email domains, which is how we know that there are a number of teams entered from abroad, but we will have to do some work on IP number mapping to produce the map. We are looking into it and if we can, we will.
ParticipantAre you ready for Challenge 2? Hoping for some answers about Jamelia’s death? Bad luck. This week it is all about the questions!
ParticipantMy advice would be:
1. Don’t overload the server (see the rules).
2. Don’t try to brute force the cipher.The first of these makes it more fun for everyone, as the server won’t go down under the strain.
The second makes it more fun for you! If you have to keep submitting loads of attempts maybe it is time to sit back and try to work out what is going on with the cipher.
ParticipantYes, we’ll let this one through!
ParticipantExcellent catch!
ParticipantParticipantI am afraid we had to take the old site offline over the summer for technical reasons. We hope to bring it back one day, but for now you could try The Wayback Machine.
ParticipantI cant really give any more hints at this stage. Might say something more on Monday! Keep trying.
ParticipantThat would be telling! If you have decrypted Challenge 1A, then read it carefully. Harry’s friend Charlie tells you something really important about Challenge 1B!
ParticipantThanks Elves, good work!
ParticipantWe might be the only competition in the world that invites the pressure! Most people seem to have got in within 3 minutes or so, would be interested to know what everyone’s experience was like.
ParticipantThere is a slight grey area here, covered by the “all your own work” rule. You won’t be able to win the competition by just using off the shelf code, and it is a lot more satisfying to crack the ciphers using your own wit and ingenuity. You don’t need to use software for the easier challenges, and you can learn a lot as a beginner by tackling them by hand. We would recommend using a simple text editor to do letter substitutions once you have cracked a cipher in order to reduce the tedium of that part of the work, and we don’t expect you to write your own to do that! You can certainly find software on the web that can crack some of the standard ciphers. We would discourage you from using them. Unless you get a buzz from league table position and don’t care whether or not you earned it, you won’t get much out of that. When it comes to choosing the prize winners at the end we will be asking candidates to “show their working”, providing us with any code they wrote, and an explanation of how they cracked the ciphers. If you want to do well you will be in a much stronger position if you develop your own methods from the start.
As I said, it is a grey area. Have fun, challenge yourselves. Be proud of what you achieve.
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