The Armchair Treasure Hunt Club
The Code Book - The Cipher Challenge

The Code Book by Simon Singh is a history of cryptography from Ancient Egypt to the 21st century. Published September 1999 by Fourth Estate. £7.99 Paperback. ISBN 1857028899

At the end of the book, is The Cipher Challenge - ten separate messages encrypted using a series of different codes and ciphers, some ancient, some modern. Each of the ten messages contains a code word.

The first person to crack all ten stages and send in all ten code words would win a prize of £10,000. In fact a Swedish team of five cracked the codes and claimed the prize on 7 October 2000. They were Fredrik Almgren (Across Wireless), Gunnar Andersson (Prover Technology), Torbjörn Granlund (SWOX), Lars Ivansson (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) and Staffan Ulfberg (freelance consultant).

The website gives the winners scoreboard, and the author's site gives more background.

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