No puzzle today, as I have published my Christmas Miscellany which features a couple of good ones. Head over there if you want to try them. For one solution to the Chess Board challenge head to the bottom of the page. It is not the easiest to understand, but it has a real elegance once you have learned some group theory, and everybody should, at least if they want to understand the mechanics of many popular modern ciphers. For a much more entertaining version you could watch Matt Parker explaining the trick here on Youtube:
Now to the title of this news item. Here is a link to an article about the fascinating inventor, Francis Galton, who didn’t quite make it into this year’s story (hence, what might have been), but he should have. As someone pointed out to us, his plans for a domestic telegraph network prefigured much of the things we take for granted now. His telotype must surely have intrigued his Royal Society colleague, Charles Babbage. Maybe he will make an appearance in the Cipher Challenge universe in the future!
Of particular interest were Galton’s plans for a hardware based encryption system to be overlaid on the telegraphy in order to automate a substitution cipher. As you all now know, that would not provide a lot of security, but it was an interesting idea, and must have paved the way to machines like the Enigma and Fialka that provided much higher levels of secrecy for many years.
Now back to the Chessboard Challenge, as understood by a group theorist. (You know what they say: to someone with a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.)