Progress Report 2010

Due Date

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Executive Summary

For decades the written code that is linked to the “Summerton Man Mystery” (or Taman Shud Case) has been undecipherable and delivered no solid information about his history or identity. This project aims to bring light to the unsolved mystery by tapping into the wealth of information available on the internet.

Recent collection of random letter samples has been used to reinforce previous claims that the code is unlikely to just be a randomly generated sequence of letters. Along with thorough revision and checking of previous code used to produce results, it has been agreed that the Summerton Man code is most likely initialism.

The code found with the dead man will be used in conjunction with a suitable “Web Crawler” and specific pattern matching algorithms. The aim is to target websites of interest and filter through the raw text available in search of character patterns that are also present in the code. Once some solid results are obtained, frequency analysis will hopefully enable a solid hypothesis on some possibilities in regards to the meaning behind the code.

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Aims and Objectives

The aim of the project is to make progression with respect to the Summerton Man Case through use of engineering techniques such as information theory, problem solving, statistics, encryption, decryption and software coding. Through use of such techniques, the results from the previous year’s project will revised and used to solidify the pathway for the rest of the project. Once past results are properly revised the next aim of the project is to attempt to utilise a web crawling device in order to access information stored in raw text on websites of interest. Specifically designed algorithms will then be used on the sourced text in order to search for patterns and reoccurrences that may be of interest or relation to the contents of the Summerton Man Code.

Project Background

Mainly taken from proposal - michael will work on and edit this part

Requirements and Specifications

include block diagrams/workload breakdown - michael will edit previous block diagra, to include new bounds/search type requirements

Approach for remaining part of the project

Sites of Interest

i.e what websites will be of most interest? why?

Project Management

discussion of any differences between the project execution and the original plan due to aspects such as technical difficulties/changes in project aims i.e. only searching 1 website rather than entire internet!! its too large for now :P

Risk Management

changes in risks? anything that has happened

See also

• Cipher Cracking 2010
• Final report 2009: Who killed the Somerton man?
• Timeline of the Taman Shud Case
• List of people connected to the Taman Shud Case
• List of facts on the Taman Shud Case that are often misreported
• Structuring the Taman Shud code cracking process
• List of facts we do know about the Somerton Man