Project ADA

Students: Get involved

The Exeter Riddle 

Can you solve the Exeter Riddle? Each of our three winners will receive a voucher for an escape room (or Amazon alternative)*.

Team up with friends from across disciplines, or take on the challenge solo, to solve seven diverse puzzles and crack the code! 

Academics from across the University have set fiendish puzzles that will test your verbal, numerical and visual reasoning skills. There is more than one way to get the final answer and if you look carefully there are a couple of clues... 

» Download the riddle as a PDF

You have until noon on Friday 11 October to crack it!

Submit your answers here

Congratulations to our winners!

  • Etienne, Computer Science
  • Huw, Year 4 MMath
  • Oliver Year 1 Classical Studies with Spanish

The answers were:

  • M
  • R (Ram)
  • S (User
  • P (POET: Pie Over Extra Trees)
  • U (Under the Weather)
  • F (Function)
  • F (Sitting on the Fence)

These spell ‘Mrs Puff’ the name of Ada’s childhood cat- you might have spotted some feline clues hidden.

Competition Ts & Cs 

*£50 voucher for Red House Mysteries or £50 in Amazon vouchers if preferred 

Three winners will be randomly selected from the correct (or most correct) responses submitted before noon on Friday 11 October 2024 

Open to current students at all levels.  

With huge thanks to the puzzle setters: 

  • Achim Brucker- Professor in Computer Science (Chair in Cybersecurity)  
  • Kate Ellacot- Associate Professor in Biomedical Neuroscience 
  • Richard Flower- Associate Professor in Classics and Late Antiquity 
  • Chris Stokes- Senior Lecturer in English 
  • Aline Villavicencio- Professor in Computer Science 
  • Hywel Williams- Professor of Environmental Data Science