Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge 132
mikejuk writes "Queen Elizabeth II has made her first ever visit to Bletchley Park, the home of the UK's World War II code-breaking efforts and now a museum. To mark the occasion, the Queen has issued a code cracking challenge of her own — 'the Agent X Code Book Challenge' — aimed at getting children interested in cryptography. Perhaps a royal programming or general technology challenge is next."
Obligatory: (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:the intellectual side of WWII (Score:5, Insightful)
It is good to hear isn't it?
Finally the old place is getting some attention. I've been there a couple of times now. it's a great old place, it was important for the war, and it's something of a spiritual home for the computer.
Colossus may not have been the very first (there was a german machine?) and it was certainly kept secret for far too long after the war, but some lasting good leaked out of it through Turing's papers. It was one of a series of false starts that slowly, eventually led us here.
Of course the pioneer, the early bright light of our field was hounded to death for being gay, a man who had saved many lives and sped the end of the war. If there is one thing that should tell us homophobia is *bad* this is it.
Seventh code answer... (Score:2, Insightful)
Basically it's a two-bit finite state machine and a pair of lookup tables.
"Can you list all the 16 countries of which her majesty is the queen?"
Good news!? (Score:5, Insightful)
In the middle of the recent fallout from the discovery of the abuses that happened during the credit bubble years (banker bonuses, press abuses, police corruption, cozy relations between politicians and the press), the Royal Household seems to be one of the few institutions that's coming out as squeaky clean.
So with a bit of luck, actions by the Queen might have a little more impact in public opinion than they would during the "time-of-excesses".
So even though I'm neither a royalist nor a british citizen, I welcome and applaud anything that might portray to kids the notion that technology is cool - they've been too long enthralled by dreams of being footballers or TV celebrities.