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£10,000 in prizes on offer to young code breakers in national competition

September 24, 2002

Mathematicians at the University of Southampton are challenging young people across the UK to try their hand at cracking codes to win cash prizes for themselves and their schools.

Experts have devised a web-based competition involving a sequence of encoded messages encrypted with successively stronger ciphers. The competition will run in weekly stages, starting in October, with prizes awarded each week to the first code breakers to submit the correct solution, from a total prize fund of £10,000.

The University of Southampton National Cipher Challenge 2002-3, as the competition is known, is launched today and follows a highly successful Cipher Challenge run locally by the Faculty of Mathematical Studies earlier this year.

The codes in the National Cipher Challenge will relate to a fictitious correspondence between three great scientists of the 19th century-Charles Babbage, Countess Ada Lovelace and Charles Wheatstone-as they take part in an adventure concerning a missing revolutionary cipher machine that they have invented.

Organiser Professor Adam Wheeler, Dean of Mathematical Studies at Southampton, is sure that as well as being educational, the cipher challenge will be great fun for participating youngsters. `We hope to get young people involved in maths, science and engineering by challenging them to crack the codes. The decrypted message will give clues to the ciphers to be used in subsequent messages, and will also help the solvers understand the historical and intellectual development of cryptography and related science and technology, as well as some of the cultural and political context of the time,` he said.

`Our aim is that it will be more than just a competition but will educate and engage young people more widely in mathematics, science, history and technology.`

The competition is being run by the Faculty of Mathematical Studies in association with the Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science and the Faculty of Science at Southampton. It is sponsored by IBM, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and the EducationGuardian.co.uk.

The National Cipher Challenge also has the backing of Lord May, the President of the Royal Society, who said: `Mathematics, in all its applications in science, technology and engineering, is more relevant than ever to our daily lives. But we should not forget the other essential component of mathematics, well known to all mathematicians -the enjoyment and intellectual stimulation that its challenges provide, and the thrill and satisfaction of successfully meeting those challenges.`

Half of the £10,000 prize money will go to schools to purchase learning materials in mathematics and science, the other half to the code breakers themselves. An IBM ThinkPad laptop is also one of the prizes.

The competition is open to young people under the age of 18 years and under, who are in full time school education in the UK. Entries may be from individuals or teams of up to 3 students. For more information log onto http://www.maths.soton.ac.uk/cipher

Southampton, University of