Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and MathsBombe Competition

28 Nov 2017

2018 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition and MathsBombe Competition - Registration Opens 1 December!

Do you know anyone in secondary school or sixth form who likes cracking codes or solving puzzles? Or maybe you just know pupils who want to win some prizes? Registration for the 2018 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition (Year 11 and below in England and Wales, S4 in Scotland and Year 12 in N. Ireland) and the 2018 MathsBombe (Year 13 and below in England and Wales, S6 in Scotland and Year 14 in N. Ireland) opens on 1 December 2017!

The 2018 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is now in its seventh year! It’s an online competition run by the University's School of Mathematics. Every one to two weeks a new chapter of the story is released and there are six chapters in total. Each chapter has a new cryptographic puzzle to solve. The team (one to four people) that solves the chapter’s puzzle the fastest wins a prize, but there will also be five 'spot prizes' for every chapter chosen at random from teams who submit the correct answers!  

The prizes have been sponsored by the flight search company Skyscanner.  Skyscanner was set up by two former computer scientists from The University of Manchester – two people who directly benefitted from Turing’s contributions to Manchester and computing. At the end of the competition we will host the Alan Turing Cryptography Day on Wednesday, 25 April 2018 with everything from a live cryptography challenge to a prize ceremony for the competition winners. It’s not to be missed!

For older sixth form pupils, there is the 2018 MathsBombe! This is an online competition, with two mathematical puzzles being released every fortnight. With four sets of puzzles in total, participants will be competing against other students from across the UK. The puzzles will be quirky, fun and cover the full spectrum of Mathematics; they will not be directly related to the A-Level syllabus and will be unlike problems in, say, the UKMT. Instead, students will need to use their problem-solving skills and be able to ‘think outside the box’ – valuable skills for students going on to study STEM subjects at university.  MathsBombe is supported by the Dame Kathleen Ollerenshaw Trust.

The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition begins on Monday, 15 January 2018, with MathsBombe starting on Wednesday, 10 January 2018.