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Essay Instructions: CIS-482

INTRODUCTION TO CRYPTOGRAPHY

RESEARCH PAPER 1

Title: World’s Renowned Cryptographers and Cryptanalysts

This is an individual or a group project. If you choose to work on this project individually, your research paper should be 4 pages long. If you choose to work on this paper in a group of maximum 2 students, your paper should contain 7 pages.

Over several centuries a number of individuals contributed to the cryptology field. For example, the mathematicians Leonhard Euler (Swiss) and Pierre de Fermat (French), who lived in the 17th century. They both made several very important discoveries related to prime numbers more than 300 years ago and had not envisioned then that these discoveries would be used in modern cryptography today. Some of the 20th century pioneers of the U.S. cryptology were Herbert O. Yardley, William F. Friedman and his wife Elizabeth, Agnes Meyer Driscoll, Frank B. Rowlett, and Lester Hill. Others scientists like Claude E. Shannon (U.S.), who received the Nobel Price, made invaluable contributions to the field as well. Alan Turing (English), Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Ró?ycki, and Henryk Zygalski (Polish) contributed to breaking the code of the Enigma cipher machine used by Germans during the Second World War.

Write an essay that briefly describes the contributions of these individuals to the cryptography field. Submit a 4-page or 7-page typed (double spaced) Word document by the due date. Format the document as follows: Font 12; Times New Roman; left, right, top, and bottom margins at 1”. Use one blank line space between paragraphs. In the footer, include page numbers. No cover sheet is needed. Place the essay title, your name(s), and course number on the first page in boldfaced form. Abstract, introduction, body of the report with suitable subheadings for sections, conclusion, and at least five references (Internet, books, and papers) listed alphabetically should follow. All references should be cited properly in the body of your essay. Proofread your essay both for spelling and grammar. Staple all the pages together. The score for of your paper will depend on its contents and professional appearance.

Essay Instructions: Answer the following questions:

1. What is the difference between thinking, intelligence (artificial) and consciousness?

2. Will there ever come a time when machines (robots) or computers will possess
human-like thought and conscious awareness (or sentience)?

3. If Cleverbot or some other chatbot was able to fool all of the people
all of the time, would that be proof of sentience or conscious awareness?

“Consciousness is a term that refers to a variety of aspects of the relationship
between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as:
subjectivity; awareness; the ability to experience or to feel; wakefulness; having
a sense of self-hood; or the executive control system of the mind.“

Wikipedia defines Sentience as: the ability to feel, perceive or be conscious, or to
have subjective experiences. Eighteenth century philosophers used the concept
to distinguish the ability to think ("reason") from the ability to feel ("sentience").

In 1950 Alan Turing devised a test to see if computers are able to “think”. His intent was to see if a program simulating human conversation would be able to fool those interacting with the program. The task is to identify whether the program is human or a computer. The computer successfully "fools" the subject if the subject is unable to tell if he/she is interacting with a computer or human after 5 minutes of "chatting" on the keyboard. If the program is successful in fooling 30% of the subjects (judges), it will have passed the Turing Test. Turing thought the challenge would be met by the year 2000 but no program has succeeded to date. Because the initial challenge did not have a prize, Hugh Loebner, a British mathematician decided to provide some incentive to those attempting to meet the challenge by offering a prize of $100,000. The best attempt each year would win $7000.