Just 55 hours and 45 minutes until the launch of the first competition challenge. Parts A and B will go live at 3pm on Thursday 7th November and be available until 23:00 on Wednesday 13th (lucky or unlucky, you decide).
As usual the part A challenge is scored entirely on accuracy, with a score of 100 meaning no mistakes. We had one or two queries about what the number in the score represents: A score of 99 broadly means one small error – a missing character, one character wrong or 2 adjacent characters swapped while a score of 98 means a couple of errors like that and so on. The feedback will show you roughly where the first mistake occurs. For scores below 50 we truncate them to zero and block the feedback to discourage fishing attempts (by which we mean trying to use the feedback mechanism as a brute force attack on the cipher).
Part B is scored for accuracy AND speed, but accuracy is always more important than speed. A score of 100 for a submission at 22:58 on Wednesday will beat any score on Thursday 7th November except 100. We use the same scoring algorithm as part A for accuracy, but score speed using the points table you will find at https://www.cipherchallenge.org/schedule/. For a live challenge, just open it and click on the Deadlines link at top left, and for an upcoming challenge just click on it on the schedule page.
Prizes and medals will be awarded to our top codebreakers based on their performance in the part B challenges, but you can get certificates for your entries in Part A and Part B separately, as well as your performance in the overall competition from Challenge 4 onwards..
The leaderboards will be published after the end of each round, usually at around 11am on the day of the next challenge.
For the early stages of the competition we are publishing instant feedback on your submissions, so if you make a mistake you will have plenty of time to fix it, though after round 5 we will switch to delayed feedback and you will only get it in the next time band. It is a good idea to get in the habit of checking your own work so you don’t end up relying on our help too much, but if you do run into trouble, remember that ACCURACY ALWAYS BEATS SPEED, so if you find a mistake in your submission it is ALWAYS better to resubmit than not.
Have fun!
