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Revision as of 04:55, 26 September 2006

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Elonka Dunin, 2006. Photography by Wm Stage

Elonka Dunin (born December, 1958) is an American game developer, writer, and amateur cryptographer who is an expert on the Kryptos sculpture/cipher at the CIA's headquarters.

Biography

Dunin was born in Santa Monica, California, the older of two children to Stanley Dunin, a Polish-American mathematician, and Elsie Ivancich, a Croatian-American dancer and dance ethnologist at UCLA.

Dunin's interest in computers started as a child when her father, who worked at companies such as the Space Systems Division of Hughes Aircraft, took her to his office in the 1960s. There Dunin played with large mainframe computers such as the IBM 360 and IBM 370. She learned her first programming language, Fortran, while still in elementary school. Dunin graduated in 1976 from University High School and went on to study Astronomy at UCLA. Then she joined the United States Air Force, where she worked as an avionics technician at RAF Mildenhall in the United Kingdom, and Beale Air Force Base in California, maintaining C-135 cargo planes, and SR-71 and U-2 reconnaissance aircraft. After the USAF, she traveled the world working at a variety of jobs, ranging from a computer programmer in Colorado to an English teacher in Rio de Janeiro.

In the 1980s, Dunin became involved with the growing BBS culture, and in 1989, while working as a temporary legal secretary in Los Angeles, this overlapped into the early multiplayer games such as British Legends on CompuServe and Simutronics' GemStone II on GEnie. In 1990, she moved to St. Louis and began working for Simutronics.

Dunin speaks several languages, and has traveled to every continent including Antarctica, which she visited in 1999 with an expedition organized by Dr. Louis Friedman of the Planetary Society.[1]

Game developer

Since 1990, Dunin has worked at Simutronics in St. Louis, Missouri, in game development. In 1993, their game CyberStrike won the first ever "Online Game of the Year" award from Computer Gaming World magazine, and contracts soon followed with America Online, Prodigy and CompuServe. In 1997, Simutronics launched its own website, play.net.[2]

Dunin was the product manager for GemStone III, executive producer for the Hercules and Xena-based multiplayer game Alliance of Heroes, and worked on the development of most of Simutronics' other products, including CyberStrike, Modus Operandi, DragonRealms, and the upcoming Hero's Journey. Her current title is "General Manager of Online Community."

She is also a founding member of the International Game Developers Association's Online Games SIG, and senior editor of some of their annual White Papers on various aspects of the online game industry.

Cryptographer

File:Elonka.jpg
Elonka Dunin

Dunin began achieving public recognition for her cryptography hobby in 2000, when she was awarded a prize for cracking the PhreakNIC v3.0 Code, designed by se2600. In 2002, she was invited to speak at CIA headquarters regarding steganography and Al-Qaeda codes.[3] During this visit she began a closer study of the Agency's Kryptos sculpture. She started a small personal website with her notes, and early in 2003 published a new type of solution technique for part 3 that supplied a possible "pencil and paper" method for solving it -- all previous published solutions had involved complicated mathematical formulae. Dunin then began to build a website compiling all of the works of the Kryptos sculptor, James Sanborn. Also in 2003, Dunin organized an effort to solve the code on a Kryptos sister sculpture, the Cyrillic Projector, which succeeded in September 2003 after the cryptographic portion was cracked by Frank Corr of North Carolina.[4]

These events, plus hints referring to Kryptos on the bookjacket of Dan Brown's 2003 bestseller The Da Vinci Code, steadily increased the visibility of Dunin's growing website, which became the most-used source for information about the CIA sculpture, even more popular than the CIA's own website.[5]

In late 2003, Dunin published a webpage entitled "Elonka's list of Famous Unsolved Codes and Ciphers", which ranked the most famous ciphers in the world such as the Beale Ciphers, the Voynich Manuscript, the Dorabella Cipher, Kryptos, and others.

In January 2005, a high-profile article appeared in Wired about Kryptos, and more major media attention followed, including segments by CNN, NPR, UK's The Guardian, France's Libération, and many others. As of February 2006, Dunin's websites have had hundreds of thousands of visitors, and over 1.5 million page views.

In mid-2005, Dunin was approached by the British publisher Constable & Robinson about compiling The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles, which was released in both the United States (with publisher Carroll & Graf) and United Kingdom in March 2006.

Public speaker

Dunin is a member of the IGDA and the Planetary Society. Along with speaking to government agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, Dunin is a frequent speaker on cryptography and online games at conferences such as Dragon*Con, PhreakNIC, Def Con, Shmoocon, Notacon, and the International Game Developers Conference, and has thrice been invited to be a co-host on the Binary Revolution webcast.

Works

  • The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms, US ISBN 0-7867-1726-2, was released April 2006.[6]
The UK title of the book is: The Mammoth Book of Secret Code Puzzles, UK ISBN 1-84529-325-8
  • (editor) IGDA Online Games White Paper, 2002. PDF
  • (editor) IGDA Online Games White Paper, 2003. PDF
  • (senior editor) IGDA Web & Downloadable Games White Paper, 2004. PDF
  • (senior editor) IGDA Persistent Worlds White Paper, 2004. PDF

Games

Contributor/Consultant

Dunin is quoted or thanked for contributions in the following books:

  • Amy Jo Kim's Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities, 2000, Peachpit Press. ISBN 0-201-87484-9
  • Lee Sheldon's Character Development and Storytelling for Games (Game Development Series), 2004, Course Technology PTR. ISBN 1-59200-353-2

Trivia

Dunin has several notable relatives.[7] They include:

Notes

  1. ^ The Planetary Society Antarctic Expedition aboard the Akademik Sergey Vavilov
  2. ^ play.net
  3. ^ Solving the Enigma of Kryptos
  4. ^ Cryptography Timeline
  5. ^ Cracking the code
  6. ^ Books by Dunin
  7. ^ Dunin Family tree

References

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Elonka_Dunin&oldid=77851123"