Stephen Bond
The National Cipher Challenge Paul Wingfield (1990) & James Lloyd (2005)
Dr Paul Wingfield
September 2021 marks the twentieth anniversary of an outreach initiative that is notable in being open to anyone at secondary school: the National Cipher Challenge, run by the University of Southampton School of Mathematics, which is in Trinity’s Link Area of Hampshire. Trinity has supported this annual cryptography competition for schools since 2005, when I as Admissions Tutor and Professor Joan Lasenby (Engineering; 1978) proposed that the College sponsor a prize alongside IBM, GCHQ and the British Computer Society.
Over the years, the Cipher Challenge has brought Trinity into contact with a wide variety of students from a huge range of schools across the UK, many of which are remote and would be extremely unlikely to receive a visit from a Fellow or member of the Schools Liaison team. What all of these students have had in common is simply a thirst for intellectual endeavour of the sort that lies at the heart of Trinity’s educational mission. A significant number of the Challenge’s prize winners have in fact come to study Maths, Natural Sciences and Computer Science at Trinity; indeed, in the 2011 Challenge the Trinity College prize was won by a two-woman team from Dartford Grammar School for Girls: Natalie Behague and Florence Salter, both of whom came to the College in 2012 to read Maths – a remarkable double success in a subject that tends to be maledominated. Some Trinity prize winners are now quite far advanced in their careers. The T R I N I T Y A N N UA L R ECOR D 2021 123
FEAT U R ES
The Challenge is open to anyone in full-time education who is 18 or under on 31 August of the year in which the competition finishes. Its format is straightforward. Entrants Dr James Lloyd. may compete singly or in teams. Between the start of the school year and Christmas the competitors attempt to break a series of cryptograms published weekly on the competition website. The initial puzzles are comparatively simple, but in later challenges the cryptograms become much harder to break. Prizes are awarded on the basis of how accurate submitted solutions are and how quickly the entrant(s) have broken the ciphers. The prize winners and other randomly selected entrants are then invited to a day held at Bletchley Park consisting of a special lunch, lectures on mathematical and cryptographic topics, and the prize-giving ceremony.
