


It also contains essays by Jim Gillogly and John Palagyi, who might be considered as runners-up, and a highly readable 40-page report by the Swedish team who solved the Challenge (see below). This part of the website attempts to tell the story behind the Cipher Challenge. The Challenge was officially solved on October 7, 2000, after one year and one month of arduous effort by codebreakers, amateur and professional, around the world.

In addition to the intellectual reward of cracking all ten messages, there was a prize of £10,000 for the first person to solve the Challenge. The Cipher Challenge was a set of ten encrypted messages to be found at the end of The Code Book, a history of codes and code breaking that I published last year.
