Editing Cipher Cracking 2012

== Supervisors ==
*[[Derek Abbott|Prof Derek Abbott]]
*[[Matthew Berryman|Dr Matthew Berryman]]

==Honours students==
* [[Thomas Strafold]]
* [[Aidan Duffy]]

==Project guidelines==
*[http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/project_handbook_2009.pdf Project Handbook]

==Project description==
In this project you will attempt to solve a possible murder that took place in Adelaide in 1948. This crime remains unsolved till today, but you can use engineering to bring our knowledge closer to the killer. You can read the details about the dead body and the circumstances [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case]

Associated with the dead body was this secret code:

:MRGOABABD
:MTBIMPANETP
:MLIABOAIAQC
:ITTMTSAMSTGAB

(See the original photograph, as there may be an extra line, and some of the M's may be W's. Some people also think that the last "I" is really a "V". Also the last G is probably really a C). To this day code crackers have been unable to decrypt it.

== Weekly progress and questions ==
This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.
*[[Cipher cracking 2011 weekly progress]]

==Useful notes==

As useful bits of information come to light, just list them here:

*

==Approach and methodology==
We expect you to take a structured approach to both the validation of last year's results, and the writing of the software. You should carefully design the big-picture high-level view of the software modules, and the relationships and interfaces between them. Think also about the data transformations needed - you will start off with html web pages, and in the end will need some matlab graphs.

==Possible extension== 
If you knock off this project too easily and are looking for a harder code cracking problem to try your software out on, you can progress to analyzing another famous unsolved mystery: the [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript Voynich Manuscript]

== Expectations == 
We don't really expect you to find the killer, though that would be cool if you do and you'll become very famous overnight. To get good marks we expect you to show a logical approach to trying to find the patterns from the code on the web, and any other attempts to crack the code.

== Relationship to possible career path==
Whilst the project is fascinating as you'll learn about a specific murder case—and we do want you to have a lot of fun with it—the project does have a hard-core serious engineering side. It will familiarize you with techniques in information theory, probability, statistics, encryption, decryption, and datamining. It will also improve your software skills. The project will also involve writing software code that trawls for patterns on the world wide web (exploiting it as a huge database). This will force you to learn about search engines and databases; and the new tools you develop may lead to new IP in the area of datamining and also make you rich/famous. The types of jobs out there where these skills are useful are in computer security, comms, or in digital forensics. The types of industries that will need you are: the software industry, e-finance industry, e-security, IT industry, Google, telecoms industry, [http://www.asio.gov.au/ ASIO], [http://www.asis.gov.au/ ASIS], defence industry (e.g. [http://www.dsd.gov.au/ DSD]), etc. So go ahead and have fun with this, but keep your eye on the bigger engineering picture and try to build up an appreciation of why these techniques are useful to our industry. Now go find that killer...this message will self-destruct in five seconds :-)

==See also==
* [[Final Report 2011]]
* [[Stage 1 Design Document 2011]]
* [[Stage 2 Progress Report 2011]]
* [[Cipher Cross-off List]]
* [[Media:Cipher GUI.rar|CipherGUI 2011 (Download)]]
* [[Web Crawler 2011|Web Crawler 2011 (Download)]]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0DEF-FDLso 2011 Project Video (YouTube)]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SoZVuOq8XmI 2011 Final Seminar Part 1 (YouTube)]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UIM8NlmPXD4 2011 Final Seminar Part 2 (YouTube)]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMlkG82rK4 2011 Final Seminar Part 3 (YouTube)]
* [[Timeline of the Taman Shud Case]]
* [[List of people connected to the Taman Shud Case]]
* [[List of facts on the Taman Shud Case that are often misreported]]
* [[List of facts we do know about the Somerton Man]]
* [[The Taman Shud Case Coronial Inquest]]
* [[Letter frequency plots]]
* [[Structural Features of the Code]]
* [[Markov models]]
* [[Primary source material on the Taman Shud Case]]
* [[Secondary source material on the Taman Shud Case]]
* [[Transition probabilities from selected texts]]
* [[Listed poems from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam]]
* [[Using the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam as a one-time pad]]
* [[Using the King James Bible as a one-time pad]]
* [[Using the Revised Standard Edition Bible as a one-time pad]]
* [[Transitions within words]]

== References and useful resources==
If you find any useful external links, list them here:
* [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taman_Shud_Case The taman shud case]
* [http://www.library.cornell.edu/colldev/mideast/okhym.htm Edward Fitzgerald's translation of رباعیات عمر خیام by  عمر خیام]
* [http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/ Adelaide Uni Library e-book collection]
* [http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page Project Gutenburg e-books]
* [http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/archives.html#foreign Foreign language e-books]
* [http://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Pages/Introduction.aspx UN Declaration of Human Rights - different languages]
* [http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/tamanshud/SSC_mckay1999.pdf Statistical debunking of the 'Bible code']
* [http://enc.slider.com/Enc/OneTimePads One time pads]
* [http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/jan2000/olson.htm Analysis of criminal codes and ciphers]
* [http://www.fbi.gov/hq/lab/fsc/backissu/april2006/research/2006_04_research01.htm Code breaking in law enforcement: A 400-year history]
* [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1389095.1389425 Evolutionary algorithm for decryption of monoalphabetic homophonic substitution ciphers encoded as constraint satisfaction problems]

==Back==
*[https://myuni.adelaide.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp Back to MyUni]
*[http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott Back to Derek Abbott's homepage]
*[http://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au Back to EEE Department page]
*[http://www.adelaide.edu.au Back to the University of Adelaide homepage]