First prize winners at the Weizmann UK safe cracking competition

Habs students took part in Weizmann UK’s annual physics tournament, where Lower Sixth students created puzzles using physics principles to design and crack safes.

Held at Dulwich College, over 100 students from 14 schools took part. Habs Boys’ team, Alien Bastion, won first place securing the Weizmann UK Physics Prize.

Jack (SFS3) shared his experience of the day:

“The day started off with Isaac (SFS1), Noah (SFJ3), Jack and Ben (SFH2) setting up their safe in Dulwich College.

The aim of the competition was to design a safe and then crack other teams’ safes while trying to design your own to be more difficult for others to crack. The safes themselves were student-built boxes locked with physics puzzles, requiring quick thinking and detailed physics knowledge to crack within a 10-minute timespan.

After a short briefing, the competition officially began with two team members staying with the safe to ‘defend’ – ensuring the safe was restored to its original condition after each opposing team had tried to crack it. The other two members of the team were ‘attacking’ – trying to crack other teams’ safes.

After a whole morning of cracking rounds, it was time for the judging rounds, where for an hour the team was relentlessly grilled by judges, ensuring that the team fully understood the physics behind the safe and could explain how every part of the puzzles worked. The team answered excellently, not once failing to answer their questions, despite many other teams being left with no answer to the judges’ questions.

After the hour of judging, it was back to more cracking rounds, before all the safes were brought to the main hall for a brief gallery session, where the teams could look at all the safes on display, talk to teams they didn’t get a chance to meet and admire the vast array of physics on display, before the awards were given. After a long day the Habs team were crowned winners and will move on to the Weizmann International Safe Cracking Tournament”

We are extremely proud of the skill, ambition and curiosity that our students showed in the competition. Congratulations to team Alien Bastion and good luck for the International Tournament!