100th anniversary of Alan Turing, celebrate with free beer

100 years ago Alan Turing was born, in his sadly short lifetime he achieved a number of fairly impressive things, broke the enigma cipher, invented modern computing and invented the Turing test. On his day off he ran up and down the river in Cambridge and narrowly missed a place in the Olympic marathon team.

We haven’t done anything quite as impressive as that, although to be fair I don’t think anyone else in the last century has either. However some time ago at the Cambridge Beer Festival team Mythic entered a code cracking challenged based on a piece of ciphertext printed on a poster.

BLEQXVXEKPNRMWBRMVMVERNMWMZNQTTMRKMTMRHP

This is a substitution cipher which team Mythic cracked on the first day. You can decipher it with this perl one liner,

echo ‘BLEQXVXEKPNRMWBRMVMVERNMWMZNQTTMRKMTMRHP’ | perl -pe ‘tr/NMWZQTRKHPEBLXV/sonfidtcukaemlb/;’

which outputs

emailblackstonetobobatsonofsiddotcodotuk

We did, and we now have to get onto the more difficult task of finding a convenient day to have a barbeque and drink the beer we won.

If you think that working for a company that goes to beer festivals and solves problems by writing little bits of code is fun our jobs page is here: Mythic Jobs. If you’re running a web facing company and thinking that this is terribly clever you might want to think about our managed hosting.