9 The Long Game
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves
Sir Edmund Hillary
9.1 Challenge 10B
There is a particular kind of madness reserved for Challenge 10B. If this is your first year, you’ll probably discover that soon enough. And if you’ve done this before, you already know the deal.
One of the most difficult things I find with 10B every year, apart from the cipher itself, is knowing when to stop and take a break. Or more accurately, knowing when to stop for now.
When you’re deep in the middle of some bizarre and increasingly unhinged line of thought about letter frequencies or key lengths or whether Harry has personally decided to ruin your evening, taking a break feels almost impossible. It’s so easy to fall into that trap of ‘I’m so close… just a bit longer…’ and then 5 hours later your eyes hurt, brain’s fried, and you’re resisting the urge to throw your laptop out the window.
It feels completely counterintuitive, some of the best insights I’ve had came when I was doing something completely unrelated like rowing or cooking.
And yet, even knowing that, I still find it difficult to step away when I am in the zone, at least in what feels like the zone but is sometimes actually just the early stages of cognitive decline. Over time, though, I have found a few things that help. None of them solve the cipher for you, but they do make it much easier to return to it as a somewhat functioning human being.
9.1.1 Write Down Everything You Know
Every hour or just pick a timeframe, jot down what you know. Not what you hope is true, or what your current favourite theory requires to be true. Just what you actually know. Write down repeated n-grams, likely cribs, structural observations. Even the obvious things, especially the obvious things.
This also has the very useful side effect of reminding you that you probably have made more progress than it feels like. When you are stuck in the middle of something, it is very easy for all the small observations to blur together into one giant sense of getting nowhere. But once you write them down, you often realise that the problem has become more defined than it was an hour ago.
9.1.2 Have a snack
Your brain is doing a ridiculous amount of work while you are problem-solving, and there is a reason athletes are constantly being reminded that food is fuel. You are not less of a codebreaker because you paused to eat a snack.
9.1.3 Check in with your team if you have one
It’s very easy to disappear into your own rabbit hole of weird little theory ecosystem. You start becoming emotionally attached to ideas that would sound completely deranged if you said them out loud, which is precisely why it helps to say them out loud. Even if only to have someone else gently inform you that your beautiful theory about the spacing pattern is, in fact, nonsense.
So take a moment to sync and share weird hunches with your team, and remind each other to take breaks as well.
9.1.4 Setting Expectations
During Cipher Challenge season, especially towards the end, I have found it helpful to make it very clear to my family and people around me that I will probably be a bit mentally elsewhere for a while so they know what to or not to expect from me. I find that this definitely does reduce some background stress.
9.1.5 Sleep
I don’t think I need to explain this further. I appreciate this might be boring advice, especially to students, but sleep is not a scam. It’s objectively one of the most effective forms of problem-solving available to you, so please remember to sleep at a somewhat sensible time for a reasonable number of hours. There is no medal for staying up the longest.
9.1.6 Stepping Away
Slightly unconventional, but I have a hoodie I only wear when working on the cipher challenge1.
When I take a break, I physically change out of it. It sounds silly but that very act of changing the hoodie helps me switch mental gears and actually rest. As much as we all love the challenge, I’m sure we all have other things (including food and sleep) that need getting done and I just found that having a physical reminder helped me compartmentalise.
There’s a reason the codebreakers at Bletchley had hobbies and didn’t spend every waking hour staring at ciphertexts. Alan Turing for example used running as a way to relieve stress from his intense mental work.2.
The people we now imagine as these intellectual giants were still, at the end of the day, human beings with brains and bodies and limits. And if even they needed hobbies and movement and time away from the work, then you are probably allowed to go outside for a bit.
9.2 Sticking With It
Having done the cipher challenge for the five years, my only real regret was not sticking with 10B till the end in my second year.
I gave up too early and convinced I was going nowhere after working on it for just over a day, only to see others break through with just a bit more persistence.
What I’ve learned since then is that hints do come, but you’ve got to have patience. They’re mostly be subtle or buried under obscure forum comments, or phrased in a way that only makes sense after you’ve cracked it.
My point being, you can be much closer than you think while still feeling completely lost. And if you stop too early, you never get to find that out.
9.3 Celebrating the Little Wins
It’s very easy to let the whole thing feel overwhelming. So try and celebrate the little victories. Remember that marginal gains eventually add up.
Winning is great, obviously. I am not about to pretend that nobody cares about doing well. Of course they do. I did too. It sounds cliché to say value the process over the outcome but it’s actually true. Performance brings pressure with it, and the more you care about something, the more tempting it becomes to turn it into a referendum on your intelligence, your effort, and possibly your worth as a human being.
This is, to be clear, a terrible idea. One of the easiest ways to ruin something you love is to only let it matter if you are succeeding at it visibly. And the Cipher Challenge is far too interesting to reduce to that.
Do not let the desire to do well take away the reason you started in the first place. Do not let the need to perform strip all the curiosity and delight out of the process. Because underneath all the frustration and the confusion, there is something genuinely beautiful here: the experience of wrestling with a difficult idea and slowly, stubbornly, beginning to understand it.
It’s quite funny but I think that if a cipher has annoyed you enough to make you want to throw your laptop across the room, that is kind of wonderful3. The fact that you care that much and that a block of apparently meaningless symbols has somehow managed to grip your attention so completely that you are still here, thinking, and trying, is rare. Most people spend huge chunks of their lives bored by the things they are doing. So if you have found something that is frustrating and difficult and maddening and still somehow compelling enough to keep pulling you back, that’s a beautiful thing.
Remember that the feeling of finally solving it is really worth the storm of frustration and patience and mild existential crisis it takes to get there. (Mostly).
9.4 More than Just Codebreaking
If anything, this challenge teaches you more than just codebreaking.
Over the holidays especially, this challenge has been escapism in the best sense for me. There’s something deeply comforting about knowing that no matter what else is going on, there’s always a cipher waiting to be cracked, and a community of people trying, failing, thinking, posting, hinting, and occasionally losing their minds in roughly the same direction as you.
In many ways, the lessons you learn during the competition stay with you as well. Some of the most difficult things I’ve faced over the past few months were made more manageable because of what I learned while struggling with the challenges. Patience, persistence, and the willingness to keep trying different ideas even when the solution isn’t obvious are skills that apply far beyond cryptography.
So work hard, care about it, get stuck, get annoyed, and keep going. But don’t forget to enjoy it as well, because challenges like these are rare, and life would be much duller without them.
And with that, I’ll leave you with the one piece of advice that seems to survive every bad idea, dead end, and mild existential crisis: DON’T PANIC.
