Science Olympiad Code Busters

Science Olympiad CodeBusters

Test Manager - Create/Delete/Edit Tests

Question Manager - Manage/Delete unused questions

Solving Guides!

Looking for solving guides for Ciphers? We have many excellent guides written by ACA members that should put you on the road to solving ciphers faster.

Cipher usage for Division B/C this year.

If you are trying to figure out what ciphers will be used for what type of event, we have a nice Summary of Ciphers used for the 2023-2024 Season that was made by reading the current rules. As always, any official clarifications or rule updates override anything on that page, but it is a good start.

If you are looking for a resource sheet to print out for practice, you can find it here.

New Ciphers!

For Division B/C we have added a preliminary version of the Nihilist Substitution Cipher. We are working to get the Complete Columnar Transposition Cipher implemented.

Summary of what's new:

Version 7.7.0

Cryptarithms and Hill ciphers now check the question to make sure that it matches the problem. A new tool has been added when creating a test to allow adjusting the question score values of the overall test to allow distribution of the last two digits of the score in order to reduce the likelihood of a tie.

Version 7.4.0

Cryptarithms now have a generator which will search sets of words to give problems to choose from. As always, please report any problems at github.com/toebes/ciphers/issues.

Version 7.1.3

Cryptarithms should be fully supported now. As always, please report any problems at github.com/toebes/ciphers/issues.

Previous Versions...

Are you a coach looking for hints and solving guides? Here are three places to go:

Use the Answers and Solutions automatically generated for any question
Use the resources listed on the national Science Olympiad CodeBusters site
The @NCSO_cb twitter feed includes guides for solving just about every type of problem in the event

Are you an Event leader looking to create a Division C Regional or Invitational test? You can use this sample test as a starting point for a good mix of questions and nominal score values. Don't forget to Randomize the Aristocrats and pick new values for the questions. You can also randomize the order of the questions when editing the test.

2022 Samples

Some Christmas Themed Cryptarithms

Other Samples

2020-2021 Regional and State Tests

Contributors

This would not be possible without the tireless volunteer work of a good team of developers:

Randy Labaza - Many of the interactive tests, automatic scoring, and way too many other items to list here.
Joshua Gao - Nihilist Substitution Cipher.
Sean McDonald - Authentication system
John Toebes
Robert Gan - Date picker functions.