Editing
Final Report 2012
(section)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Warning:
You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you
log in
or
create an account
, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.
Anti-spam check. Do
not
fill this in!
====Previous Honours Projects==== This is the fourth year for this particular project, and each of the previous groups has contributed in their own way, providing a useful foundation for the studies undertaken this year and into the future. =====2009===== The original group from 2009, Andrew Turnbull and Denley Bihari, focused on the nature of the "code". In particular, they looked at whether it even warranted investigation - could it just have been the random ramblings of an intoxicated mind? Through surveying people, both drunk and sober, they established that the letters were significantly different from the frequencies generated by a population sample, and weren't likely to be random. Given the suggestion that the letters had some significance, they set about establishing what that significance was. They considered the possibility that the letters represented the initial letters of an unordered list, and this was shown to have some merit. They also tested the theory that the letters were part of a transposition cipher - where the order of letters is simply swapped around, as in an anagram - but the relative frequencies of the letters (no 'e's whatsoever for example) suggested this was unlikely. After discounting transposition ciphers, they looked at the other main group of ciphers - substitution ciphers, where the letters of the original message are replaced with totally different ones. They were able to discount Vigenere, Playfair, Alphabet Reversal and Caesar ciphers, and examined the possibility the code used a one-time pad that was the Rubaiyat or the Bible, though these were eliminated as candidates. Finally, they attempted to establish the language the code was written in, and in a comparison of mainly Western-European languages found that English was the best match by scoring the languages using Hidden Markov Modelling. Based on this, they discovered that, with the ambiguity in some of the letters, the most likely intended sequence of letters in the code is actually: WRGOABABD WTBIMPANETP MLIABOAIAQC ITTMTSAMSTCAB <ref name= Final Report 2009> "Final Report 2009"; Turnbull, A and Bihari, D; https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Final_report_2009:_Who_killed_the_Somerton_man%3F</ref> =====2010===== In the following year, Kevin Ramirez and Michael Lewis-Vassallo verified that the letters were indeed unlikely to be random by surveying a larger number of people to improve the accuracy of the letter frequency analysis, with both more sober and more drunk participants. They further investigated the idea that the letters represented an initialism, testing against a wider range of texts and taking sequences of letters from the code to do comparisons with. They discovered that the Rubaiyat had an intriguingly low match, suggesting that it was made that way intentionally. From this they proposed that the code was possibly an encoded initialism based on the Rubaiyat. The main aim for the group in 2010 was to write a web crawler and text parsing algorithm that was generalised to be useful beyond the scope of the course. The text parser was able to take in a text or HTML file and find specific words and patterns within that file, and could be used to go through a large directory quickly. The web crawler was used to pass text directly from the internet to the text parser to be checked for patterns. Given the vast amount of data available on the internet, this made for a fast method for accessing a large quantity of raw text to be statistically analysed. This built upon an existing crawler, allowing the user to input a URL directly or a range of URLs from a text file, mirror the website text locally, then automatically run it through the text parsing software. <ref name= Final Report 2010> "Final Report 2010"; Lewis-Vassallo, M and Ramirez, K; https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Final_report_2010</ref> =====2011===== In 2011, Steven Maxwell and Patrick Johnson proposed that there may already exist an answer to the code, it just hasn't been linked to the case yet. To this end, they further developed the web crawler to be able to pattern match directly, an exact phrase, an initialism or a regular expression, and pass the matches on to the user. When they tested their "WebCrawler", they did find a match to a portion of the code, "MLIAB". This turned out to be a poem with no connection to the case, but shows the effectiveness and potential for the WebCrawler. They also looked to expand the range of ciphers that were checked, and wrote a program that performed the encoding and decoding of a range of ciphers automatically, allowing them to test a wide variety of ciphers in a short period of time. This also lead them to use a "Cipher Cross-Off List" to keep track of which possibilities had been discounted, which were untested, and which had withstood testing to remain candidates. By using their "CipherGUI" and this cross-off list, they were able to test over 30 different ciphers, and narrow down the possibilities significantly - only a handful of ciphers were inconclusive, and given the time period in which the Somerton Man was alive, more modern ciphers could automatically be discounted. <ref name= Final Report 2011> "Final Report 2011"; Johnson, P and Maxwell, S; https://www.eleceng.adelaide.edu.au/personal/dabbott/wiki/index.php/Final_report_2011</ref>
Summary:
Please note that all contributions to Derek may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see
Derek:Copyrights
for details).
Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!
Cancel
Editing help
(opens in new window)
Navigation menu
Personal tools
Not logged in
Talk
Contributions
Create account
Log in
Namespaces
Page
Discussion
English
Views
Read
Edit
View history
More
Search
Navigation
Main page
Recent changes
Random page
Help about MediaWiki
Tools
What links here
Related changes
Special pages
Page information