Irishman defeats 600,000 to crack code

A Dublin man is one of just three people in the world who managed to come out on top of the toughest code breaking challenge in the world.

David McBryan, 41, from Dublin and living in Edinburgh, fought through five layers of the challenge set by Britain’s national intelligence and security agency to fend off 600,000 people to come closest to fully solving the puzzle. The cryptography challenge was set by director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan in his Christmas card.

Mr McBryan, a former Fifteen to One gameshow winner who now writes questions for the show, studied maths and artificial intelligence at university. The Dubliner said “logical rigorous thinking” was the key ingredient that helped him almost break the code.