AN Edinburgh-based code-breaker has proved to be almost a match for the UK’s national intelligence and security agency.
David McBryan, 41, is one of the winners of GCHQ’s Christmas card cryptography challenge.
The winners, all men, battled through five rounds and beat 600,000 people to come the closest to fully solving the series of challenges set by director of GCHQ Robert Hannigan in his Christmas card.
Mr McBryan, who is originally from Dublin, said the possibility of winning was “driving him along” as he attempted to outsmart the GCHQ cryptographers.
He said: “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.”
Mr McBryan, a former Fifteen to One game show winner who now writes questions for the show, studied maths and artificial intelligence at university.
He said “logical rigorous thinking” was needed to be a good puzzle-solver but that “most of all it’s got to be just the experience of doing puzzles – the more you do the better you’ll get at it”.
The compendium of word and number puzzles took a team of 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 scannable QR bar code to direct people to the next part.
Puzzlers then had to work out URLs and IP addresses through solving a series of clues until they reached the final stage.
Mr McBryan said: “Once you got through there’s no confirmation whether you’re on the right track or whether you got the right set of answers and that’s one of the most frustrating aspects of it. So you need to be fairly obsessive to keep plugging away at it and trying different things.
“For a long time after I got all the solutions I was still looking for more because you’ve got no idea if you’ve got it all.”
He added he wanted to “thank whoever the compilers are for coming up with such a great set of puzzles and possibly damn them for the frustration of not letting us know when we’d finished”.
Thirty thousand 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.
GCHQ denied that the puzzle was an elaborate ploy to recruit fresh talent to its ranks, but said the winners, like anyone else, were “welcome to apply” for jobs.
One of its cryptographers, whose identity cannot be revealed, said the team initially worried it would be too hard but added it was “very gratifying” that people had got so far.
He said: “I think we really didn’t know whether it would be half a dozen people having a go so it was really difficult to judge how hard to make it.
“In fact when tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of people were actually looking at it we were really surprised.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules here