The Cipher Challenge website is not a typical beast. It has to cope with very high peak loading whenever we publish a new challenge, and a lot of tricks are used behind the scenes to help it along, including the simplified site that steps in when the site is too busy and just provides access to the challenges. Some of you will have seen that yesterday at around 3pm and might have wondered why. This video might show you. It shows our monitoring board at 10 Degrees (courtesy of Google Analytics) which allows the team to track site use in real time. You can see that activity increases 10-fold as the Challenge goes live and stays at that peak for a while.

We hope that the new measures we have put in place meant that you all got the Challenges when you wanted them yesterday and that you are having fun working on Challenge 2A and 2B. Do sign up to follow us on Twitter during half term, we will keep in touch that way, and keep an eye on the Forum pages. We will also update the hints and tips on the Challenge 2 page tomorrow in case you are stuck.

Keep at it,

Harry

Well done to everyone who took part in the first round in this year’s National Cipher Challenge. We had over 3500 submissions this round which represented a huge effort from you all. You can download a certificate recording your results from the Answers tab on the account menu and see how everyone else got on in the Leaderboards. Quite a few of you are not on the Leaderboard yet, and that is because we have decided to only include teams with a team name. Even if you are competing on your own, if you want to be on the board them please log in at this page to set a Team Name that we can use, even if the team consists just of you. Unless you are comfortable with your actual name being displayed (and we advise you to check with your parents or teachers before deciding to do that) we would strongly advise you to avoid putting personal information in the team name. And please make sure it is suitable for publication, I don’t want irate emails from Head Teachers! Consider this another opportunity to demonstrate your creativity. We will regenerate the Leader Boards regularly to make sure you appear as soon as possible.

A reminder that Challenge 1 and Challenge 2 are both practice rounds to get you ready for the more difficult ciphers you will tackle in later rounds, so you can relax a bit about speed. This week is a good time to work out your system for tackling the Challenge, to get the team organised, or perhaps to try a new method to speed things up. Maybe you could write an Excel spreadsheet to count the letter frequencies (hint: try the Advanced Filter function) or to carry out a decryption (maybe using a VLOOKUP in Excel or the search and replace in a word processor).

Again, well done. Keep it up!

“We all do”, they chorused.

As of 16.38 we have had 668 submissions to the two challenges

We have 2651 teams registered containing 4692 team members.

Around 20% of our website hits seem to be from London, ten times more than any other city!

Right now there are 175 active users on the site in the UK, and 1 in Qatar!

We have had 12503 hits on the site from England, 630 from Scotland, 226 from Wales and 31 from Ireland.

The challenge is live so you should be able to read it on the challenge page. You can get maximum marks on Challenge 1B any time up to midnight on Saturday so there is no rush. For the first two weeks we will not store all your answers just your most recent one, and you will be able to get instant feedback on it, so if you have made a mistake you can correct it quickly and resubmit using the Update button. Once you have it right don’t submit again! You can always check your most recent answers using the Answers menu item under your account details at the top of the page.

Of course you could use our feedback system to cheat a bit since we are switching it on immediately, but we won’t do that later in the competition. In any case it is much more fun not to do cheat, and the scores in the first two rounds won’t count in the final competition league table.

Have fun, good luck,

Harry