Editing Semester A Progress Report 2012 (section)

===Introduction===
This progress report is a summary of the work in which Aidan Duffy and myself have achieved over the first semester of our Final Year Honours Project for the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, under the supervision on Derek Abbott and Matthew Berryman.  

The overall goals of this project is to decipher the code found in association with the Somerton Man, and use this to identify the victim and ultimately solve the case.  In order to do this we first must determine what the code is, what cipher is (if any) is used, what language it was written in or whether it is just a series of random letters.

The secondary aspects of the project is through the identification of the Somerton Man, this is a new aspect to the project and will be achieved through creating a 3D model of the victim.

The techniques and programs we have been using have been designed to be general, so that they could easily be applied to other cases in used in situations beyond the aim of this project.

====Background====
====The Case====
At 6:30am on December 1st 1948, a man was found deceased on Somerton Beach, South Australia, resting on the rock wall at the top of the beach. The victim contained no form of identification and his fingerprints and dental records didn't match any international registries.  The only items on his body were some cigarettes, chewing gum, a comb, an unused train ticket and a used bus ticket.

The report from the autopsy identified the man's stomach and kidneys were congested and there was excess blood in his liver; this suggested that his death was unnatural, and most likely the cause of an unknown poison.  44 years later, in 1994 under a review of the case, it was suggested that the death fits that of the poison digitalis.

A month and a half later, a suitcase was found left at Adelaide Railway Station and believed to belong to the victim.  However none of these items contained any further clues on the identity of the man or his killer.

====The Code====
One other item was found on the victim’s body, inside a sewn up pocket of his trousers, a small piece of paper torn form a book with the words "Tamam Shud".  Translated from Persian this means ended or finished.  Which can be found on the last page of the book called The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.  On November 30th 1948, a man in Glenelg found this book left in the backseat of his car, testing later on confirmed that the paper found on the victim matched this book.

In the back of this book, written in pencil were five lines of capital letters, with the second line crossed out:


WRGOABABD

MLIAOI

WTBIMPANETP

MLIABOAIAQC

ITTMTSAMSTGAB


The similarity between the second line and the fourth line indicates that a mistake was made, which increases the likelihood that the lines are in fact a code. However over the years no one has yet been able to determine the meaning or purpose of the code.

Over the years there have been multiple attempts at identify and deciphering the code, however there si yet to be any acceptable results. One notable attempt was made in 1978, by the Australian Defence Force, who conducted analysis the code and stated that there wasn't enough symbols to provide a pattern, the symbols could be a complex substitution code, or a meaningless response to a disturbed mind but ultimately were unable to provide a satisfactory answer.

This leads to the motivation behind this project, as there have been 60 years, and three years worth of projects run by the University yet the code still remains unsolved.

====Previous Year's Work====
This is now the fourth year of the project, and the previous three groups have provided some valuable insight into the case, and this is the basis on what we have built on.

In 2009, the group established the letters were not random, the code wasn't a transposition cipher, and the code was consistent with representing the first letter of words.

In 2010, the group continued along the first letter path, and compared the code against particular texts. However they were unsuccessful in their results, with the largest matches coming from The Rubaiyat.  They also developed a simple web application and pattern matcher, which was designed to download and search the contents of webpages looking for patterns; this was then compared with the Somerton code.

In 2011, the group expanded the web application and created the web crawler that would search the Internet by itself. They also focused on various ciphers and cryptographic techniques that may have been used to generate the code.

All three groups also worked on a Cipher Cross-off List; this list contains ciphers and encryptions and these have been systematically tested and crossed off using frequency distribution and through decoding methods.  There are currently more then 30 ciphers, which have been disproved, showing the method used for each of these. 

====Group Members====
This year the project has myself, Thomas Stratfold, a Bachelor of Engineering (Telecommunications) student, and Aidan Duffy, a double degree Bachelor of Engineering (Electrical and Electronic Engineering) and Bachelor of Economics student. With the new aspect of the project, the 3D reconstruction, we decided to work together on it. However with the other aspects we decided to separate, Aidan would focus on the Web Crawler while I was going to focus on the Language analysis and cipher cross off.