Heuristic Language Analysis: Techniques and Applications
Jeremy Lennert
Intel NorthWest Science Exposition
March 2001

I (Bart Massey) had the privilege of mentoring Jeremy Lennert, a Junior at Sunset High School in Beaverton Oregon on a project involving the application of automatic language analysis techniques to cryptography, with the assistance of Sarah Mocas.

This project was entered in the 2001 Intel NorthWest Science Exposition, the regional qualifier for the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair for secondary students in Oregon and Southwest Washington. Jeremy placed first in the Computer Science category of the regional competition! For this achievement he received a $3000 Computer Science or Engineering scholarship to Portland State University as well as the Intel Excellence in Computer Science award, which came with a certificate, a trophy, and $200 in cash. Thanks are due to the PSU College of Engineering and Computer science and to Intel for their generous contributions.

Jeremy has written a research paper [PS.Z][PDF] describing his work. He has also given permission to access his source code [ZIP][DecryptDemo][Decrypter][Encrypter]. Jeremy's work is in some part a realization of ideas from a 1993 paper by Ganesan and Sherman [GZIPped Postscript][PDF].

Congratulations to Jeremy Lennert on an excellent piece of work!