Editing Progress Report 2010 (section)

===The Code===
[[Image:Somertoncode.jpg|thumb|right|The Somerton Man Code.]]
The code found in the back of The Rubiayat revealed a sequence of 40 – 50 letters.  It has been dismissed as unsolvable for some time due to the quality of hand writing and the available quantity of letters. The first character on the first and third line looks like an “M” or “W”, and the fifth line’s first character looks like an “I” or a “V”. The second line is crossed out (and is omitted entirely in previous cracking attempts), and there is an “X” above the “O” on the fourth line. Due to the ambiguity of some of these letters and lines, some possibly wrong assumptions could be made as to what is and isn’t a part of the code.
Professional attempts at unlocking this code were largely limited due to the lack of modern techniques and strategies, because they were carried out decades earlier. When the code was analysed by experts in the Australian Department of Defence in 1978, they made the following statements regarding the code:


* There are insufficient symbols to provide a pattern.
* The symbols could be a complex substitute code or the meaningless response to a disturbed mind.
* It is not possible to provide a satisfactory answer.


Last year’s [[Final report 2009: Who killed the Somerton man?|code cracking project group]] ran a number of tests to selectively conclude which encryption method was mostly likely used. In their final report, they determined that the Somerton man’s code was not a transposition or substitution cipher. They tested the Playfair Cipher, the Vigenere Cipher and the one-time pad<ref>[[Final report 2009: Who killed the Somerton man?]]</ref>. The group concluded that the code was most likely to be an initialism of a sentence of text and using frequency analysis, determined that the most likely intended sequence of letters in the code was:



<center>WRGOABABD</center>
<center>WTBIMPANETP</center>
<center>MLIABOAIAQC</center>
<center>ITTMTSAMSTCAB </center>