UKMT Team Challenge


Alan Turing Cryptography


Competition Manchester University


One morning in April, four of us (two from both Years 7 and 8) piled into Miss Pipe’s car and headed off to Bishop of Winchester School for the UK Maths Trust Team Challenge regional final. After a brief introduction from two elderly women who said they were retired teachers, we began to get ready for the first round. This was the group round, where the entire team worked together to solve ten questions, each of which was marked out of six by an allocated teacher from a different school. Amazingly, we managed to achieve the full total of sixty marks on this round!


This was soon followed by the Shuttle round, in which your teams divided into pairs and sat at either end of the table. Each question had four parts, with one pair given parts one and three and the other pair parts two and four. Each of questions two to four required the answer to the previous question before it could be completed. We did remarkably well on this round too, scoring fifty-six out of sixty!


After a short pause for lunch (during which Miss Pipe and the other teachers went off into a different room from all of the students) we began round three: the dreaded crossnumber. This is similar to a crossword, but all of the cells are numbers with clues such as “The sum of the first 12 square numbers” or “23 across + 7 down”. However, you were still in pairs, with one pair getting the across clues and the other pair getting the down clues. We managed to get fifty-three out of fifty-six on this round.


The final round was the relay, in which one pair moved to a different table. The first pair were given question one and two chances to get it right, after which they had to leave it and give the other pair question two. This was repeated until either the time was up or all the questions were answered (which, as I know from past experience, is virtually impossible!) We only got forty out of sixty for this round.


After this, the scores were announced. Miss Pipe had already said she thought the school she was monitoring (Parkfield School) weren’t as good as us, so when they came third, I thought that we were guaranteed a place in the top two. However, when second place was announced and we still hadn’t been mentioned, I began to worry. We were all holding our breath as they announced first place – it was us! This was an amazing achievement considering most teams contained at least one Year Nine. Now, we are going to be participating in the National Final in London on the 18th of June. By Ken Pickard


Having recently completed the University of Southampton National Cipher Challenge (a challenge based mainly on mathematical skill with codebreaking), I began hunting for a similar challenge and came across the Manchester University Alan Turing Cryptography competition. This was a completely different style of challenge, based mainly on logical thinking. For example, the first round was only seven words long and the cipher used was a reversed alphabet, so that A=Z, B=Y, C=X etc. You are awarded points from 15 down based on how soon after the first team you enter the word it asks for. This was particularly annoying for me, as my journey home can sometimes take over an hour. There were six rounds, released at 4:00PM on Mondays. I managed to come 17th in this challenge out of over 1500 entrants, with nobody scoring the maximum of 90 points. However, after the fifth round I was 5th, having only dropped one mark on round four. Each round has a fun story to accompany it too, featuring Mike, Ellie and (in this case) the ghost of a monstrous hound known as Old Schuck.


The challenge became harder over time, with rounds four and six being (for me) the hardest. Round five (despite its lateness in the competition) was actually relatively simple – you were told an Ordnance Survey map to use and given a grid reference of a word in a place name.


Below is the final round, presented on the laptop screen of the main antagonist of this year’s challenge, Truman Cuddeny. The files down the side are entitled (in order) A Treatise on the Binomial Theorem, Bruce Partington’s Plan, Liber Abaci, The Dynamics of Leporine Populations and The Dynamics of an Asteroid. I am sure Mr Pape would be willing to bestow achievement points on anyone who manages to solve it, considering I only scored 1 out of 15!


By Ken Pickard


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