Acknowledgements

Stefan Katzenbeisser is, of course, the first person I owe special thanks to. I feel very lucky that, despite the formal hassle of acting for the first time as an external supervisor at the UDA, and despite his busy schedule, he decided to give a stranger from Leonding and his odd ideas on natural language and steganography a chance. He has dedicated an irreplaceable amount of work and time, helping me to cultivate these ideas and to put them down in a written form. Without his commitment the project would never have been possible in this way.

In addition, I would like to thank Manfred Mauerkirchner, the UDA, and the University of Derby for offering the ambitious program of study that allowed me to efficiently continue my HTL-education, taking it on to an academic level. Our Final Year Project Coordinator Helmut Hofer has been a very cooperative partner when it came to formal and administrative issues.

Furthermore, I would like to thank Gerhard Höfer for supervising the project on computational linguistics I carried out last year, and for many interesting discussions on artificial intelligence and its philosophical background. I would like to thank the faculty at HTL-Leonding and UDA, especially Peter Huemer, Günther Oberaigner, and Ulrich Bodenhofer for the influence they have had on my picture of computer science.

I would like to thank the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz, the Technische Universität Wien, the Technische Universität München, the ACM and the IEEE, whose libraries and digital collections were important resources for this project.

Last, but not least, I would like to thank my parents who have supported me and my work in every thinkable way, especially my mother, Dorothea Bergmair, for proofreading many drafts of the report.