Cipher cracking 2009 weekly progress

Weekly progress and questions

This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.

Semester 1 Week 1

Andrew

This Week

1. Initiated organisation of first group meeting with Denley, Prof Abbott and Dr Berryman. This meeting occurred on thursday March 5^th.
2. Reread newspaper article concerning the somerton man murder that was published in the sunday mail several weeks prior to the meeting, and viewed the code as it originally was. This prompted several discussions, but most suprisingly the inclusion (or lack of) the apparently crossed out line of text.

Next Week Plan

1. Attempt to contact the police museum in an attempt to view the somerton man exibits
2. To view and take photos and video where possible
   • Somerton beach
     • during the day
     • at dusk
   • The gravesite of the man
   • The Adelaide Railway Station
3. Try to find which train line was followed by the somerton man on the day of the murder
   1. Find out time taken to travel to the stop he got off at
      1. If possible, look at different train speeds from then to now
      2. Calculate the most precise time possible allotted for him to write/encrypt the code
   2. Try writing on a train to find how difficult it is to write neatly
4. Hire out National Treasure 1 & 2
   • Watch the Playfair code scene(s)
5. Try to find a copy of Omar Khayyam
   • If possible take photos of it
6. Begin attempts of coding for encrypting/decrypting and e-book
   • Plot relative histograms for letter distributions

Denley

1. Researched case backround: Wikipedia and police site. First group meeting held. Researched Playfair and Vigniere cyphers.

Short Term Goals

1. Visit sites (graveyard and beach) and take pictures etc
2. Research frequencies of letters (in different languages)

Semester 1 Week 2

Denley

• Wrote a simple text counter to count letter frequencies in a given text. George Orwell's 1984 had a frequency characteristic very similar to those given here as general English letter frequencies
• Started playing with encoding decoding algorithms. Got Caesar cypher working. Will work on extending this to Vingniere soon

Short Term Goals

• Track down a copy of National Treasure 2 and rip the scene showing the use of the Playfair cypher
• Try some more eBooks in the frequency calculator and try to get an idea of if/how the English language changes over time and try other European languages too (as Somerton Man had a European look to him)

See also

• Cipher Cracking 2009

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