THIS IS THE answer to yesterday’s code-breaking puzzle.

The question:

“There has been a lot of interest in the fascinating stories of codes and codebreaking particularly after the film The Imitation Game. Everyone now knows the name Alan Turing but do you know about Ireland’s wartime codebreaker? Richard Hayes was described as “a colossus of a man”. Maybe this phrase is referring to the code crunching computer at Bletchley Park used by British Intelligence to crack Nazi codes. To the outside world Hayes was director of the National Library of Ireland. Known to only a few he was Ireland’s wartime master codebreaker. His remarkable career in espionage began when Military Intelligence asked the librarian to examine an intercepted Nazi message. Hayes has a connection with codebreaking centre Bletchley Park in that his shared results were of great use to British codebreakers.

Can you follow Ireland’s master codebreaker Richard Hayes and crack the following?

1,14 5,1,19,25 15,14,5 20,15 19,20,1,18,20

18,5 8,16 9,3,1 19,9,19,9 8,20

10,71,12,81,16

Solutions:

“An easy one to start”

“This is a cipher”

“This message is in code”

Method:

This puzzle has three parts.

Part 1 is the simplest of ciphers A = 1, B = 2 etc.

So 1,14 5,1,19,25 15,14,5 20,15 19,20,1,18,20 translates to:

AN EASY ONE TO START

Part 2 uses the same cipher but with a little twist

Using the simple cipher above (A=1, B=2 etc) 18,5 8,16 9,3,1 19,9,19,9 8,20 translates to:

RE HP ICA SISI HT

Now read that backwards and you get:

TH ISIS ACI PH ER

Rearrange those letters:

THIS IS A CIPHER

The third part is a little tricker.

10,71,12,81,16

This is decoded as:

THIS MESSAGE IS IN CODE

The numbers are keys to find words in the passage above. A generous clue is given with the words “follow…Richard Hayes”. The words are counted following “Richard Hayes” in the text.

A cipher needs a key or set of instructions. A code needs a codebook to translate.

How did you get on? Let us know in the comments.