Re: Alan Turing Cryptography Competition

On 20/02/2025 08:35, David Entwistle wrote:

On Wed, 19 Feb 2025 19:51:44 +0000, Mike Terry wrote:
 

??  It looks exactly the same as before to me.  What was changed?
(I have not found the answer to this one yet.)

 I'd give it another go with any answer you may have tried previously...
 I couldn't find an answer that was accepted, despite having the decrypt
for more than a week, so got in touch. They replied "Apologies. We had a
typo in our solution and in the clue. These have now been corrected and
your (correct) answer should now work".
 You'll also see on the web page "19th February 2025: Answer corrected".
 Not sure how the problem was solved in ten minutes of going live, if they
didn't have the right answer themselves. I guess that was just a fluke.
 The clue was just a bit mangled and read "M: Groan. This one is more will
get you in a spin. If you get mixed up. Take a deep breath and count to
three". It has now been corrected to read correctly.

hmm, at the time I posted my browser was still showing the original text!  Guess it's my browser cacheing the old web page or something.  The new text shows when I look now.

 The maths element is more difficult than the cipher - for me anyway.
 

Well, I haven't decrypted anything yet.  :)
Then again I've not made a really serious effort - I saw that it looked like one of those "permuted block" cyphers where you write the text into a block in one order and extract it in a different order.  I tried a couple of obvious possibilities then got discouraged when they didn't work out. There are literally hundreds of possibilities I could try, but don't really have the time right now...
Mike.