26/06/15

26/06/15

Today I had my first meeting with my supervisor, went through the first two weeks of a future learn course on Developing Your Research Project and listened to a 50 minute lecture on the mathematics of codes and code-breaking by Dr James Grime.

In my meeting with my supervisor, we went over the topic I am basing my project on and looked at the less obvious codes that would be interesting to include in my research (DNA and the political aspect of coding), as well as some more possible resources that could be used throughout the duration of the course (GCHQ website, attempting to contact them).  This will be helpful when I'm conducting my preliminary research as it will help me to decide which books to borrow from libraries and which online lectures to watch, etc.  We also filled out the Record of Initial Planning so as to have the ideas written down on paper to get the project started.

Before the meeting, so that I could have a vague idea of what I will be doing, I looked up the AQA EPQ specification and I went through the first two weeks of an online course that wil, hopefully, enable me to carry out a well developed research project.  So far on the course, it has explained the benefits of research projects and has guided me to draft my research proposal based on my interests.

As I'm particularly interested in mathematics, and because cryptography fascinates me, I have decided to look at codes and ciphers; their history, their complexity and how the ciphers have developed over time.  The aim of my project will be to analyse the different types of codes, compare their complexity to decide which existing code is hardest to break, and then debate as to whether or not there will ever be a theoretically unbreakable code.  For this reason, I need to knowmore about codes, so I watched the previously mentioned lecture on Youtube - and took notes - to begin learning the foundation information of this topic.  After watching the clip, I have decided to look at the way crytpography has developed since the Spartans and also to look at the enigma code (I plan to read Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges and also, to do more research on how the Bombe machine was constructed and how it worked).