Irishman defeats 600,000 to crack code
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.
“I thought I had solved it, but a news report came out a few days ago saying nobody had, so I went back and had another look and figured out what I missed, but I was too late at that point. But it seems that everyone else missed it as well and I was joint closest,” he said.
The compendium of word and number puzzles took a eight GCHQ cryptographers two months to compile, and included a mix of past and fresh challenges — with plenty of hidden material.
The first stage was a grid-shading exercise which, when completed, revealed a barcode to direct people to the next part. Puzzlers then had to work out URLs (web addresses) and IP (computer identifiers) addresses through solving clues until they reached the final stage.
Some 30,000 people made it through to the final stage and 550 of those submitted answers. Of the answers, six were considered complete by the team of cryptographers, who chose the final three winners based on the quality of their reasoning.
Each winner will receive a GCHQ paperweight, pen and signed copy of the book Alan Turing Decoded, written by his nephew Dermot Turing.
