First of all, a slight retraction. I wrote in the editorial to Issue 101 that the GCHQ Challenge seemed likely to be less of a challenge than the Magpie. This was based, as I admitted, on having a go at a few of the puzzles that showed up early on during the challenge, and finding them to be either reasonably easy or patently requiring Internet research.

I had found out about the challenge, most of which was only available online, from a newspaper that I started reading on a flight to the Caribbean at the beginning of April. My week’s holiday would effectively stop me from competing to finish first, I figured, so I didn’t really apply myself to it. But the deadline was reasonably generous (2 months), so in May I eventually had a look at all the puzzles.

I have to say that in the end I was impressed by both the variety of the original 18 puzzles and the interlinking of many of them to provide a couple of extra puzzles which allowed the final solution. They included crossword-type puzzles, Nikoli-type puzzles (think of Pieman finishes), general knowledge/research, maths, logic problems and codes – really very little that would faze a Magpie regular.

The challenges were a little variable – the few cryptic clues were generally ‘unsound’, one or two of the puzzles were trivial and a few were very tough or borderline unfair. But plenty of the puzzles were imaginative and cleverly constructed, and came up with many different ways of yielding a ‘three-digit solution’. And some of the harder ones received hints from some of the easier ones, so perseverance was well rewarded. I recommend the challenge now.

In the end I was able to deduce the one-word answer to the whole suite of puzzles, and was disappointed to find that the website on which I was meant to submit it was down. A couple of days later, it was back up, and I was unsurprised to find that “the Challenge has already been cracked, but please submit your answer anyway for the chance to win tickets to the Cheltenham Science Festival”.

Today came an email telling me that I had won tickets. “We had lots of entries – but only a handful of people cracked the code!” This was followed by a phone call, asking if I would speak to The Times, and a call from a journalist. During the calls I have begun to wonder if I have somehow morphed from a winner into the winner, but I presume all will be revealed tomorrow.

Here is what I consider to be the hardest stand-alone puzzle from the GCHQ Challenge 2011. If you can figure this out completely, let me know, because I’d love to assign the last three or four items to groups, having done enough of the puzzle to reach the required answer and given up.

Word List
In this list of words, each can be associated with another word, and that second list has a particular (and fairly obvious) property. The word pairs fall into a number of equally-sized groups. Can you find these second words?

VALLEY, ORGAN, IONS, HERB, TOWED, BACK, RACE, LANGUAGE, RHAPSODY, SUPREMACY, VIPERS, PIECE, MISCUE, SWEET, QUARTERS, CORN, GANG, BOOT, ABBEY, BANK, NORTH, MARS, SELF, FRONT, DAY, DEAL, QUEEN, DEAL, MUSK, USES, NONE, SEVEN, TIER, VISION, VENOUS, ADORN, HUMIDOR, LIFE, RAGGED, ME, ATE, TEE, EDGE, LIVERS, WELLS, HEAD, KNIFE, TOWERS, PRESSURE

Mark Goodliffe

Posted on Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 2:07 pm under News, Public.
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