In all my years of high-velocity web-browsing, I’ll honestly admit I’d never stumbled across www.royal.gov.uk, “The official website of the The British Monarchy. At first, I found it all a little bit eery, somewhat like finding mafia.it (which incidentally has some rather nice ASCII art in the HTML source).
The reason I was there was that a few days ago, I’d stumbled across a Slashdot news story I’d missed:Queen Elizabeth Sets a Code-Breaking Challenge from July 2011. This described how the Queen had released The Agent X Code Book Challenge, “aimed at getting children [specifically aged 13-16] interested in cryptography”. It was produced to accompany the Queen’s opening of a memorial at Bletchley Park, which was covered well in an I Programmer web news-story.
Naturally, I decided to download this Code Challenge from the Monarchy’s website to try out on my 7 year old son: though he needed a little bit of help to get going, he quickly got the hang of it, and actually quite enjoyed it.
There are issues, of course. For one, the “Agent X” of the title is more of a 1950s conceit than a 2011 street name, arguably leaving that side of the whole presentation a little bit too stiff-collared for contemporary yoof. Similarly, the message itself does read as if it had been transcribed from a gramophone recording, which also doesn’t really help. Finally, there isn’t actually any cryptography as such, but rather just using a very WWII-like phrase table and letter table to decipher a series of messages (and even there, the phrase “Bletchley Park” appears three times, twice with exactly the same letters).
In short, I suspect it’s more likely to stimulate interest in WW II history than in cryptography per se: so if GCHQ had some kind of school-age outreach in mind with this, I think they’ll end up quite disappointed.
All the same, it was all worth it simply for one comment on Slashdot. Amidst all the normal “be sure to drink your Ovaltine” snarkiness and noise you’d expect to find there, Nicko van Someren (whose brother Alex I happen to know well) simply commented this:
I had the pleasure of meeting HRH the Duke of Edinburgh at an event once and, upon hearing that I worked in cryptography, he told me about his time working signals in the British navy during the second world war. He said he had always been fascinated by the operation of the British TypeX equipment that he used back then. I don’t suppose that he did any code breaking but he certainly was using codes well before the Cypherpunks came along.
So while my son happily put down the Agent X code book to go back learning how to draw manga and/or playing that week’s Wii game and/or whatever else he was so busily into that day, the picture I got from the whole thing was one of Prince Philip not just playing at crypto (like so many of the Slashdot trolls), but actually using it in the field. That’s real cipher history for you.
HLHL DCDC DMDM HWHW KHKH AQAQ HMHM!
As a recent visitor and now subscriber I am struck by a couple of coincidences: I also have a seven-year-old son who is learning to draw manga and plays Wii. While this is not too unusual, I also know Agent X, or at least Number 3 here. He’s still alive, by the way, and he still owes me 400 bucks.
Robert: didn’t your mother tell you never to trust anyone with an X in their name? Luckily there’s still time to save your son from falling into the same trap. 400 bucks is 400 bucks, right? 😉
Time for respectful reflexion on a life well lived re HRH Philip Duke of Edinburgh.
Home is the Sailor, home from sea and the Hunter home from the hill..Phil. (RLS).