Students in Ryan Webb’s Discrete Math competed recently for the first time ever in the Kryptos Competition, designed for undergraduates. Mr. Webb said, “to have 3 teams score in this event in our first year is great!”
The theme of the contest is centered around the breaking, or cryptanalysis, of ciphers (secret writing). Each challenge presents contestants with a brief scenario together with some ciphertext (encoded message). The goal is to discover the original English plaintext message.
While it is not the intent of this contest to test overly technical aspects of crypanalysis or advanced mathematical algorithms, some familiarity with basic codemaking and codebreaking is certainly helpful.
Teams that scored include:
Turing Level of code mastery, meaning they solved all three problems
Gaby Monasterio, David Normansell (Deciphered all 3 codes), and Robin Donne.
Collin Thomas, Jake Morris (Deciphered all 3 codes, highest ranked high school team), and Elijah Trexler.
And,
Babbage Level of code mastery, meaning they solved two of the three challenges
Ryan Masak and Eric Duong (Solved 2 of the 3 challenges).
Congratulations Walker Discrete Math!
