Editing Final Report/Thesis 2016 (section)

==Introduction==
This project is to study on an unsolved murder case that happened on the 1st of December 1948. At 6:30 am of that day, a man was found dead on Somerton beach. This dead man carried with no identifications and his teeth were not matched with any known person, so he is called Somerton man. After investigations the SA Police found a small wrinkled piece of paper in the man's pocket, with the Persian phrase “Tamám Shud” (translated to English: to the end)printed on it. The paper scratch was later confirmed to be part of an uncommon version of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam book. Soon after the man's being found, the book was also found in the rear seat of an unlocked car parked 3 km away from the location of the corpse. [[File: SFigure1.jpg|thumb|300px|center|Figure 1 The Somerton Man]] [[File:SFigure2.jpg|thumb|300px|center|Figure 2 The Paper Scrach]]
Despite the language, the book was not much different from ordinary books, but what really interesting was the handwriting of a set of mysterious code found on the back of the book.  Considering that the main theme of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was about that people should not have any regrets when they die, combined with the meaning of the phrase on the paper scratch, it is widely believed that the book is strongly related  to the dead man. Hence the case was widely known as the Tamam Shud case [4]. 
[[File:SFigure3.jpg|thumb|300px|center|Figure 3 The Code]]
As the figure above displayed, the code consists of fifty capital letters. For the sake of getting as many samples as possible the six crossed out letters are also included.  There has been a dispute about the ambiguous “M” or “W” letters appear in the code, as a result two different versions of the code was tested (one with “M” and the other with “W”). 
After postmortem, the coroner picked some information from this dead man, such as the heart was of normal size and the death time was around 2 am of the found day. Besides, the coroner figured out that approximate three to four hours before death the man ate a pasty as meal which pathologist Dr. Dwyer suggested some poisons causing the man’s death. But the pasty should not be the source of poison through further research. Finally, after a series of investigations, the coroner still could not tell any conclusion about this man’s identity or cause of death and the dead man’s body was buried in Adelaide's West Terrace Cemetery in 1949. It became one of the Australia's most fascinating cold cases. [2][4][10]
In order to continue the study of this case, a plaster cast of Somerton man was made in 1949. The hairs which were extracted from Somerton man plaster cast and other six different students are used for spectral analysis. [23] Hair data is recorded by Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometer (ICP-MS) and this instrument is effective for micro-sampling of solid material for trace elements and the analysis of predominantly cation. [17] For collecting data, the hairs were burned by laser. Then, the instrument measured the levels of different isotopes and the relatively values of elements. After testing, the comparison for experimental results between Somerton man and six other different students can be processed.
In this project, data comparison and statistical data analysis techniques were applied to crack a set of mysterious code extracted from an unsolved possible murder case. Data comparison is a branch of computer science, which calculates the differences and similarities among data objects, personified in this case: among a large amount of strings.  Data analysis is to extract useful information from data to help generating conclusion and giving supports to it. The goal of this project is to find out in which language the code was written.  
Initially, the contributions accomplished by previous project groups were reviewed and an insight was found to be a perfect beginning point of this project: it was suggested and supported that the code was very likely to be initialism in English, meaning that the code consists of first letters of a set of English words [1].  It was an amazing guess but unfortunately two problems were found after the reviewing of their works. Despite that the method applied to calculate similarities was lacking of convincing, it had not been updated for a long time. Besides, the test numbers were insufficient to draw out any conclusions. 
Considering that similarity check algorithm is the most important component in this project, a large amount of time was spent on finding and testing a reliable algorithm. Several similarity check algorithms were researched and two of them were picked out to carry out the test.  The carefully selected two algorithms should be good enough to discuss this case. 
To deal with the other problem the test was designed to repeat multiple many times in order to get unbiased result. Writing scripts in Java simplified the repeating tests significantly. At the meantime, the hint from Professor Derek Abbott suggests to reduce the number of languages being considered in tests, which makes it possible to concentrate on the testing of several highly suspected languages.
===Motivation===
As the previous chapter stated, this project is relating to an unsolved possible murder case which has been remaining in the public’s interest for almost 70 years. Just like Professor Derek Abbott, all the group members that have joined in this case must be extremely curious about the mysterious case. The desire of finding out the truth would be the most important motivation of undertaking this project. Another motivation comes from the ethical consideration. The victim has been resting in West Terrance Cemetery without a name for decades. It will be meaningful if the identity of the victim could be unveiled. This is also for the victim’s family whom lost their relative and probably had no idea about it. Even if the case has happened for decades, it is not been forgotten. The residents still would like to see the case solved. In addition, this project can expand the knowledge for data analysis, code cracking, engineering statistics and digital forensics. In fact, this dead man was suspected to be a foreign spy due to his unknown identity. So, it is meaningful for country security as well.