Finding the right words: Furman senior wins international codebreaking competition

Emmanuel (Manu) Skora ‘23 likes word puzzles, so when he heard about a codebreaking competition for undergraduate students, it sounded like fun.

Winning is also fun, which is what Skora, a math-economics major at Furman University, did, beating scores of individuals and teams from across the country in the Central Washington University Kryptos Challenge. Skora solved all three puzzles offered in the competition in about four hours. He was, by far, the fastest individual competitor, and he beat all but two of the 70 multi-person teams from across the country and one from the United Kingdom.

Two two-person teams from Furman competed and solved puzzles. Jordan Hembree ‘23 and Hunter Mitten ‘25 solved all the puzzles, coming in 11th. Morgan Carns ‘25 and Alyssa Pate ’25 teamed up to solve one of the puzzles.

The puzzles aren’t your daily word jumble. They might appear to be dialogue between dozens of smiley-face emojis and frowny-face emojis, with no explanation at all. Or they might include a story with context and clues but a coded message. The students who participated were instructed to log in at 7 p.m. ET on Thursday, April 20, to access the puzzles. They had until Monday at 7 p.m. ET to solve them.

Skora worked on the puzzles for four hours straight and turned them in around 11 p.m. Thursday.

Christian Millichap, associate professor of math, teaches a class in cryptology. He’s familiar with the Central Washington challenge through a previous teaching role at Linfield College in Oregon and has been encouraging students to participate. This year he held a study session the week before the competition, which Skora found helpful.

The challenge is a great way for students to develop critical thinking, problem solving and pattern recognition skills, Millichap said. It’s also a great alternative to doing homework problems.

“With homework, you know you can go to the professor for help, and you know based on the class work what tools to use,” Millichap said. The Krypto Challenge is more open-ended and challenging, which is much more real-world applicable. “Being able to problem solve in that setting, that’s a transferable skill.”

Skora will get a mug, and bragging rights, for his win. This fall he’ll study at Wake Forest University, where he’ll get a master’s degree in business analytics.