Editing Final Report 2012 (section)

=====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>