2nd Annual Community College Programming Contest

Snatching the reins from Orange County Community College, winner of last year’s Annual Community College Programming Contest, Robert Lee and Justin Okamoto of Rockland Community College placed 1st this year by successfully completing six out of nine problems with an overall score of 28.

The 2nd Annual Community College Programming Contest was held on Saturday, April 2, 2011 on the Pleasantville Campus.  For four hours, 4 teams of students from the Hudson Valley Region worked diligently, many without a break, to work on 9 problems developed by the Westchester Computer Science faculty.

Each problem was worth 5 points.  One point was deducted each time the problem was submitted with an error.  If there was a tie score, then the time required to complete the problems was taken into consideration.

This year the Rockland Community College team won first place, snatching the reins from Orange County Community College who placed first in 2010.  Congratulations go out to Robert Lee and Justin Okamoto, and their coach, Lynn Aaron.  Robert and Justin successfully completed 6 questions with an overall score of 28 points.  The grand prize was a $50 gift card awarded to each team member.

The following is a sample question that was answered correctly by 2 of the teams:

Encryption uses both substitutions and transformations and combinations of both. Here we will use only transformations.  The encrypting  transformation 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ➜ 5 3 1 4 6 7 2 maps the first letter to the fifth; second to the third etc. in 7 letter increments. As an example with no spaces being used, PACEUNIVERSITY is encrypted to CIAEPUNRYESVIT.

The decrypting transformation is 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ➜ 3 7 2 4 1 5 6.  And CIAEPUNRYESVIT is returned to the original text PACEUNIVERSITY.

Your problem is to use this decrypting transformation to find the original text.  The cipher will be letters and numbers with no spaces and is <= 35 characters. Input is from the keyboard.

For example

Input:

Type the cipher.   CIAEPUNRYESVIT

Output:

The plain text is.   PACEUNIVERSITY

The 2nd Annual Community College Programming Contest was sponsored by the Westchester Computer Science Department with assistance from the Seidenberg Dean’s Office and support from a Thinkfinity grant from the Verizon Foundation.

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