2018 Alan Turing Cryptography Competition starts on 15 Jan!

12 Jan 2018

School's over the country can engage with the School of Math's Alan Turing Cryptography competition

Do you know anyone in secondary school 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) is now open and the competition starts on Monday 15 January 2018!

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! 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!

The Alan Turing Cryptography Competition is sponsored by the travel company Skyscanner.  Two of the three founders of Skyscanner were former computer scientists from The University of Manchester – two people who directly benefitted from Turing’s contributions to Manchester and computing.