Editing Final Report 2011 (section)

===Technical Challenges===
Key technical challenges identified for the pattern matching module included:
# Handling special cases
#* Upper and lower alphabet cases and recognising when a pattern existed that used a combination.
#* Recognising patterns separated by punctuation and whitespace (spanning multiple words)
#* Acknowledging patterns spanning multiple lines
# The Wildcard character.
# Providing interactivity to the pattern detector

Pattern matching programs should be flexible in that they can detect a pattern no matter what special case applies. In meeting these requirements, the algorithms should take into account that text could be in different capitalisations, separated by punctuation, split across lines or separated by other types of whitespace.

The implementation of a wildcard character into pattern matching algorithms provided another technical challenge. The need for wildcard characters was driven by the existence of ambiguities in letters in the Somerton Man code (see [[Final Report 2011#Cipher Analysis| Cipher Analysis Technical Challenges]]).

Finally, the desire to design an interactive pattern detecting algorithm that was not limited to pre-set cases as in the 2010 version created intricate technical challenges. The software in 2010 was limited by only detecting patterns specified by symbols ‘@’ and ‘#’ and only of lengths 3 and 4; this was done through an exhaustive list. The challenge of 2011 was to allow for any characters to be used for the pattern specification with any pattern size.