For the first time ever we are proud to present official National Cipher Challenge certificates. To get yours just log in to the page

http://www.cipher.maths.soton.ac.uk/certificate.php

You can print it, paper your room with it, make a desktop picture out of it, or get it made into a tee shirt, we don't mind. It should display (or download) as a jpeg.

There are one or two glitches with the system, as you might expect (it's our first time) so apologies in advance for those. In particular the names of team members may have odd formatting depending on how they were entered into the registration form. We have ideas about how to improve that for next year. For now you can always fire up your favourite image editor and edit the certificate by hand. (No changing your scores though!)

If you won one of the small prizes in the competition and still have not received it could you send us the following info asap. We have had trouble contacting many of you (emails being bounced etc) and would like to get your prizes sent out as soon we can.

Team name:
Teacher’s name:
Head Teacher’s name:
Team members’ full names:
School:
School address-
Town:
County:
Postcode:
Team name:
Cheque payable to:

It could take a while to get the cheque to you as we process them all together, so we need to wait for everyone to send us their details. It is surprisingly difficult to get people to let us send them money!

Well, what a fantastic effort! It is the biggest Cipher Challenge we have ever run, with thousands of you taking part and hundreds getting to the finish line. The standard of entries is amazingly high and our least favourite job is choosing winners. As with all the best ceremonies we will start with the small prizes and work our way up. Carry on reading to see if you won a prize.

Challenge 7 part A winners - each team to get a cheque for £25
David Tilby of The John Warner School, Hoddesdon
Marc Jeffreys of Hut 11, Woodbridge School, Suffolk
Aquila, (Yusuf and Sarah Tr) of Alcester Grammar School

The University needs to carry out a major upgrade of its electrical supply and as a result the website will be offline on the 2nd, 3rd and part of the 4th of January. Sorry for any inconvenience.

So many hints! I seem to have spent the last few days just trying to decide which hints to block, and which to publish, but now it is time to be a little (only a little) more generous.

You really do need to crack 8A to do 8B. First because Trinity tells you something crucial about the encryption method in 8B and second because even when you figure out what she is talking about, and even after you work out exactly how it was done, you will still need 8A from time to time.

Maybe more later, but not today!

Harry

Congratulations to the following winners of the £25 team prizes for part A in the fifth and sixth rounds.

Challenge 5A

The UGS Crackers, Catherine, Naomi, Ashley, Sasha, Matthew, Peter and Kate, from Urmston Grammar School
The Cyphoids, James and Jessica, from William Edwards School, Grays
Awaiting Allocation, Julia and Caroline from Horsham
Emma 'n' Sam from Wycombe High School
Those Boffs at the Front, Vicky and Leah from Tonbridge Grammar School
The Cipher Smashers, Rob and John, from Torquay Boys Grammar School
STAIRS - James and Michael from Torquay Boys Grammar School 100100001001001100011111CodeCracker10010010100100000111110010, Vickym Bishop Wand 6th Form College

As I said before, we will be scoring Challenge 8B in the same way as all the other challenges, though the time periods will be shorter. The schedule is given below. We will also be delaying feedback so that it does not arrive during the first time period, to reward those who manage to get an early correct solution without that additional assitance feedback provides.

Your scores for each part B round will be added as usual to give an overall score for the Championship. Ideally there will be a clear winner in terms of the scores, but that is unlikely so we will need to choose the three prize winners (for the IBM, GCHQ and Trinity prizes) from among those teams with the top overall score. The way we will do so is on the basis of the order in which the winners submitted their best answer to Challenge 8B. For those of you fighting for a top prize your performance (accuracy and speed) will be critical in the last round.

Just in case you haven't worked it out yet, Challenge 7B is a Hill cipher. It is a pretty simple one using a nice simple 2x2 matrix, so you should be able to crack it fairly easily. Have fun!

Thanks for your email. Sorry you are not getting our replies. All the best, Harry

We will be scoring Challenge 8B in the same way as all the other challenges, though the time periods will be shorter. We have not finalised the length of the periods yet, but they are likely to be around three hours in length. We will also be delaying feedback so that it does not arrive during the first time period, to reward those who manage to get an early correct solution without that additional assitance feedback provides.

Your scores for each part B round will be added as usual to give an overall score for the Championship. Ideally there will be a clear winner in terms of the scores, but that is unlikely so we will need to choose the three prize winners (for the IBM, GCHQ and Trinity prizes) from among those teams with the top overall score.