Editing Progress Report 2010 (section)

===Verification of Past Results===
[[Image:randomletter.jpg|thumb|right|Completed Random Letter Sample form.]]
In order to decide on a direction for the use of the web crawler, it was first important to look at the previous students work and make a decision on whether their conclusions are accepted. 

The verification of their results was undertaken in two sections:

*Collection of random letter samples for comparison to the Somerton man code
*Analysis and Review of their code

A template for collecting random letter samples was created and used to collect 45 random letter samples from a variety of subjects.  45 was chosen as it is roughly the number of letters in the Somerton man code.  Details taken from each subject include the following, and can be seen in the completed form to the right.

*Intox. Yes/no - the Physical state of each subject was recorded to keep samples taken from intoxicated subjects separate from those that were, to the best of our knowledge, not under the influence of any substance.
* Age – each subject was required to supply their age for future use 
*M/F – the sex of each subject was recorded for future use

The graphs below show the recently collected samples next to the samples collected by the previous students and the letter frequency plot of the Somerton man code. 

[[Image:Comparefreq.JPG|center|800px]]


Although the results are not identical to the previous student’s results, they are very different to the graph depicting the code from the Somerton man. It is clear that in both results there is not 1 letter that has a frequency less than 1. This leads us to agree with the previous assumption that the code has not been produced randomly.
So far there have not been enough samples from intoxicated subjects in order to produce a useful result.  This is an ongoing collection and will be finalised when there are enough samples to compile a graph that can be considered useful. 
It was initially planned to use the age and sex data that has been collected to subdivide the results into different categories in order to conclude whether the letters in the Somerton man code are better correlated to a specific age group or sex.  It was then realised that this will involve the collection of many more samples than is needed to verify the past students results and has therefore not been included in the results.  Collecting more samples and splitting the data into different categories may provide useful results for future studies into the case.

The previous year's code was used to analyse and come to a conclusion of the Somerton man's code using several well known cipher techniques. Upon reviewing the created software modules, it was decided that the algorithms used would perform the proper functions in attempting to prove or disprove their hypotheses. Their code was then compiled and run to generate a number of output files. These output files were then examined and compared to the output files that the previous project group generated. From all of these outputs, none of the files generated any legible words and could then be assumed that the Somerton man's code was neither a Vigenere, Playfair or Caesar Cipher. In fact, the results claim that the mystery code resembles a set of initialisms which may or may not be using substituted letters.