Tag Archives: gchq

A couple of links for late May

A golden chain of linksA pair of fun things to look at, just to keep things ticking over…

Ken of The Logic Escapes Me (etc.) points to Jack Hurst’s puzzle blog. Jack is rightly considered a Countdown legend, winning 16 games on the trot before coming up against Conor Travers – and if you know Countdown at all, you’ll know that while your first eight games can be against anyone and everyone, then the tournament structure starts to throw only the best against you. As Jack says in his first post, “I’ve been spending a lot of my spare time in recent months working on a software project to help me compile different puzzles. I’m now happy to share with you some of the fruits of my labour.” The site features word, number and logic puzzles; the logic puzzles do have something of a computer-generated feel to them, though the word puzzles clearly display the author’s touch more obviously. The highlights, for my money, are some original-feeling hex grid number placement puzzles called Conqueror.

I didn’t cover this at the time, but Intervirals did; after the success of the short puzzle trail that started with a Christmas card in 2015, GCHQ released a puzzle book last Christmas. Royalties from it, so far, have raised practically a quarter of a million pounds for the Heads Together campaign which works in association with a number of mental health charities. Notably, the book featured an eight-puzzles-plus-a-metapuzzle puzzle hunt, which started reasonably accessibly before getting quite abstruse. (This may also be an introduction of the term “puzzle hunt” to thousands, or tens of thousands, of solvers who weren’t familiar with it.) Stephen Peek explains how you use the answer to the metapuzzle, plus the answers to two other ciphers in the book, to reach the final stage of the puzzle, an open-ended optimisation puzzle. Stephen’s site also points to sample mathematics papers used in the GCHQ applications process; happily, these are as rigorous as you would hope for an agency which needs our brightest and best!

Could GCHQ crack Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunt?

Pablo's Armchair Treasure Hunt 2015 posterPossibly you have heard that GCHQ have issued a Christmas card with a puzzle. Solving the first puzzle leads to a series of further puzzles (word puzzles, maths puzzles and code-breaking) unless the extremely high interest means that the web server still can’t cope with the demand. This site heard about the hunt from Intervirals, though it was also widely covered in news programmes, not least a Sky News segment featuring BrainedUp.com‘s Dr. Gareth Moore. Excellent way to get tough puzzles back in the public eye.

However, if this isn’t challenge enough for you, then in a week’s time, the 2015 edition of Pablo’s Armchair Treasure Hunt will begin. You can see a low-fi version of the hunt’s poster above; the official version is rather clearer and contains a number of clues and references which will portray some of the themes of this year’s event. The hunt itself will begin in a week’s time and will likely feature several dozen cryptic questions to solve, pictures to identify, connections to make, covert messages to discover and decrypt and doubtless much more, culminating in a physically hidden box in the south of England. The first team to discover the box wins a trophy; the team that best answers and explains all the references and hidden subtleties that have been put in place, within the month-and-a-bit time limit, also win a trophy. To get an appreciation for the form and conventions of the hunt, read through the thirty-year history of the hunt; the past hunts are available online along with their explanations, and make spectacular reading.

An incredible labour of love!