Editing Final Report 2012 (section)

=====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>