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Forming a Team

Having cracked Stages 1, 2 and 4 and converted the other ciphertexts into computer files, we felt pretty good about the whole thing.

After the weekend, Staffan showed the book and The Cipher Challenge to his colleagues Gunnar and Lars, and they promptly got books of their own and joined the team. This was actually a great success since it resulted in an order to Amazon for a dozen more copies of the book, since everyone in the university department and some juggling friends wanted books of their own.

Now we were a large and undefined group of people that had just become Cipher Challenge Cracker wannabies. We did not consider this a problem, but instead invited anyone showing interest to work with the group. We felt that time would tell who was in the group and who was not. Thus, while other people in the world much later were discussing the possible formation of teams, we were a team from day one.

As time went by and the solution to Stage 9 had been revealed, leaving us with only Stages 5 and 10 to solve, the group was reduced as some of the original members lost interest. At this stage we also started to operate in a more silent way as we realized that we had quite a large task to complete for the two missing stages.


next up previous
Next: Early Success Up: Introduction Previous: Entering into the Contest
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