Alkindi: Cracking the Code!
©Alain H. / 2023 EPFL
The annual Alkindi-Switzerland contest takes cryptography into Swiss secondary schools and the grand final was held yesterday on campus with high-school students battling it out for first place!
Organized by EPFL’s School of Computer and Communication Sciences ‐ EPFL (IC) in collaboration with the Science Outreach Department (SPS), and the Animath and France-ioi associations, this year's edition more than 1’800 secondary students from across French-speaking Switzerland took part in the three preliminary challenges of the cryptography challenge, Alkindi.
In all the rounds, 9th, 10th and 11th graders worked alone or in pairs under the supervision of a teacher to solve a series of interactive problems in order to discover various aspects of crypto-analysis. The final competition challenge was held yesterday morning at EPFL during which each student team had to work together to decrypt alphabetic and numeric messages within two hours.
The winning team was j'aime-les-ananas of the Centre Lavaux Primary and Secondary School who were thrilled to have participated. For supervising teachers, the experience was just as rewarding for both them and their students. Jöelle Martone accompanied team vvmn from the Foron Secondary School. “It’s quite magical to have such a quality competition that we can offer to students as it allows them to see how we apply maths in the real world. Cryptography has a playful side and it’s a fun way for students to take their maths further.”
Team Miraculous’ mentor, Lucien Popescu from the Colombières High School says, “This has been a great experience and it would be interesting to have support to set up a school program to talk about scientific procedures such as cryptography and to do it with lots of classes.”
After the competition ended the participating students were able to take part in an organized game called “Voyage, voyage” ending the day on a fun note.
The Alkindi competition, which originated in France, is named after the ninth-century philosopher Al-Kindi, who is today considered to be one of the founders of cryptography – the study of codes.
The winners of this 2023 editon are:
1. j’aime-les-ananas (Tomkin Berens, Aurélien Favre, Ilian Paschoud) The Centre Lavaux Epscl Primary and Secondary School, Puidoux.
2. πz²a (Florent Bataïni, Yann Dessauges, Livio Dubois), Neuchâtel.
3. Les franges-ine (Luce Claizergues, Livia Salzarulo), Puidoux.
