Editing Semester A Progress Report 2012 (section)

===Previous Year's Work===
This project is now into its fourth year under Derek Abbott and Matthew Berryman's supervision, and the three previous groups to attempt to solve the code have all provided valuable insights for us to build upon. The group from 2009 were able to establish that:
* The letters are not random - they mean something; they contain information
* The code is not a transposition cipher - the letters are not simply shifted in position
* The results are consistent with an English initialism - the letter distribution is consistent with the letter distribution of the first letter of English words

In 2010, the group were compared the code's letter distribution to a particular text. Whilst they were unsuccessful in their endeavour, they did generate a large amount of pattern-matching data, and also discovered, somewhat surprisingly, that The Rubaiyat contained few, if any, matches. They also sought to harness the huge collection of data in the internet by developing and running a simple web application and pattern matcher in order to download and screen the contents of websites for patterns.
The 2011 group focused on two main aspects - expanding upon the functionality of the web crawler and pattern matcher, and investigating various cryptographic methodologies that could have been used to generate the code, then determining whether they were possible based on a comparison with the code itself. Both aspects were broadened so that they were applicable beyond the scope of the Somerton Man case.
All three previous groups have worked together on a "Cipher Cross-off List" - eliminating potential methods for encoding the letters that were available at the time, based upon their similarity to the frequency distribution of the letters in the code. Currently, more than 30 possible encryption schemes have been disproved, with the use of a One-Time Pad being a notable exception due to its (virtually) infinite number of possible permutations.