(Annapolis, MD) – An anonymous mathematician in the Annapolis area has offered a prize for the first person to decipher the encoded message included at the end of this article.

The starting prize is $100, and will increase weekly until the prize is claimed.

UPDATE: as of Feb 2 2017, the prize has increased to $1,000,000,000.

All entries must be posted to either the Novel Premise Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/novelpremise or as a comment to this article https://novelpremise.net/2017/05/09/cryptologic-challenge-win-for-deciphering-this-message/.

The answer must be completely correct, including all punctuation, capitalization, and diacritical marks, as appropriate. A brief description of the method used to decipher the text must also be included.

The winner of the prize will be determined by the earliest timestamp for a correct entry on one of the two sites. In the case of a tie, meaning that two correct entries have the same earliest time stamp, all correct entrants with that timestamp will split the single prize.

The enciphered message begins at the start of the line following the word BEGIN, and ends at the end of the line directly before the word END.

BEGIN

a8kd3hc51fxkh8jncd23dgcvnjgq809)jnbvcrw9$?/tewscv7);uytd,/35iijb:/3468

8’b!,:321/;!jhbcdxzawetyuiplkjgfsgkfjvncjdyeqdgiojbv”‘nvfjrdvh75;jvedvvnj

da247jbcseyiljb&)5rwfv7632/()$8kkncsd$)5422etuiknfdzc&!;43/wryuooknv

v$&$&&&);:ghjjjhfewq2/:;,.,!!jnbgghhgfg$$(;,?,/4(jiugdeyikn64dghv8643vbB

,/4hn&$?;gdru88&$jg543w/:;bb$$kjbv543q:ghjjjhfewq2&k&nV;F:d/wdvh$&

9&$nv:d2qsdf$%E|hvrdGhh))gf;eFGvshjIIiu6543hgffF;#%6^$bGcxdseyu8$!

END