Editing Final Report/Thesis 2015 (section)

====Aim====
The aim of Task 2 was to create a search engine to look for regular expressions that could be linked to the Somerton Man code.  Numerous studies from previous groups showed that it is statistically likely for the Somerton Man code to be an English ''initialism'' (see Previous Studies/Related Work section).  Based on this, for this task an assumption was made that the code is an ''initialism''.  A search engine was to be developed that used the letters of the code as initial letters of words in commonly used English phrases.  This concept was to be explored further using a technique that accesses a larger database in much shorter time than the web crawler developed by groups in previous years (see Previous Studies/Related Work section).  Using an n-gram database, rather than crawling the whole web for grams, had the advantage that the crawling had already been done and all grams had been recorded.  This was to drastically increase the speed at which the gram combinations on the web could be found.  The search engine was required to output a list of possible gams from the input letter combinations.    

An assumption that was made in order to complete this task was that the code is an ''initialism'', meaning that it is made up of letters that represent the first letters of an ordered series of words.  This assumption was made based on conclusions made by previous groups (see Previous Studies/Related Work section) and advice from Professor Abbott.  Due to this, a second assumption was made that the letters in the code, and thus the words in the grams, were order relevant.  A final assumption was that all variants of ambiguous letters in the code were to be included.