Circles’ roundup: Get cracking
Warm up your logical faculties and look at writing problems in new ways with code-cracking exercises from Julie Phillips
Since the earliest history of mankind we have been keeping secrets. Kids do it in the playground or when passing notes around the classroom, trying to keep under teacher’s radar. During WWII Alan Turing’s team built a machine to crack German Enigma codes. Code cracking is big business.
Even authors in their works of fiction have included codes that their heroes and heroines have to face grave danger in order to try and crack the codes and save the world; think Dan Brown’s novels and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories to name a couple. The speed by which the popularity of many puzzles has risen gives you some clue, if you’ll pardon the pun, as to how much people like a good problem to solve. There is sudoku, good for practising your maths skills; crossword puzzles – especially the sadistic ‘cryptic’ variety, guaranteed to frustrate the unsuspecting, and the mind-boggling ‘real life’ puzzles – like how far does a train travel in one day and if twenty passengers get on at station A, three get off at station B but another thirty get on, etc. Whether you love to have a go at them or they make you break out into a cold sweat, codes are all around us and they really can help the analytical part of our brain to keep limber – which will do our writing the power of good.