“From Games to Kryptos”
Elonka Dunin
Wednesday, May 18 – 3:00pm
Humanities Instructional Building 100
http://communications.uci.edu//documents/pdf/UCI_15_map_campus.pdf
Free and open to the public
Elonka Dunin is a lifetime member of the International Game Developers Association, Chairperson Emerita and a founding member of the IGDA’s Online Games SIG, and a co-Director of the Global Game Jam from 2011–2014. For over two decades she was General Manager and Executive Producer at Simutronics in St. Louis, Missouri, making award-winning multiplayer, social, casual, and mobile games such as GemStone,DragonRealms, Modus Operandi, Alliance of Heroes, CyberStrike, Tiny Heroes, and One Epic Knight. In 2014 she moved to Nashville, Tennessee to help build a new game studio, Black Gate Games, after which she moved on to the Family Education Network (Poptropica, Funbrain) to help them get their Agile development program up and running.
Elonka’s lifelong interest in cryptography became public when in 2000 she was awarded a prize for being the first person to crack the PhreakNIC Code, an up-until-Elonka unsolved puzzle created by the hacker group se2600. After the attacks of September 11th, Elonka helped out with the war on terrorism by teaching government agents about cryptography and what types of codes Al Qaeda might have been using. In 2012 she was invited to be on the Board of Directors for the building of a new National Museum of Cryptology (https://www.nsa.gov/about/
Elonka is co-founder and co-leader of a group of cryptographers who are working hard to crack a code on the famous Kryptos sculpture at CIA Headquarters, and led the international team that cracked the related KGBCyrillic Projector Cipher in 2003. She maintains a list of the World’s most famous unsolved codes on her elonka.com site, and in 2006, published The Mammoth Book of Secret Codes and Cryptograms. In 2009, author Dan Brown honored Elonka by naming one of the characters in his Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol, after her. “Nola Kaye” is an anagrammed form of “Elonka”. In 2009, she authored two articles in Secrets of the Lost Symbol, a collection of works by academics and other experts discussing the fact and fiction of Brown’s novel.
