Codes and Fervor

I stumbled onto the continuing saga of the so-called “bible code” the other day and was amused to see that the issue continues to percolate along fourteen years after the original effort appeared in Statistical Science as a “puzzle.” My own involvement was briefly in the early years when I developed some code for performing searches in documents that matched the original effort. I handed the code off to Dave Thomas of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, though I believe he was already using the results from Brendon McKay from Australian National University for his work.

A brief description may help.

Some Israeli researchers following a Kabbalah-like speculation about hidden codes in the Hebrew OT looked for words and word relationships hidden in the characters. The way they thought the words were hidden was as what they called equidistant letter sequences (ELSs). An ELS is where each letter of a word is separated in the text by a certain number of other characters. When they found an ELS, they then looked in the immediate area of the text around the words for other ELS sequences that said something interesting about the original word. They paired these together as questions and answers.

Needless to say, it is pretty easy to take any text, find interesting short words as ELSs and then find interesting words as ELSs around them. With my original code, I used the system to decide what to have for lunch. I would find the word “lunch” as an ELS, then look around and get words like “taco,” “steak” and “fish.” As one can imagine, shorter words tend to have greater representation!

Here's some examples borrowed from Brendan McKay showing ELS patterns predicting the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the text of Moby Dick:

More are here.

The whole episode demonstrates a surprising vitality to craziness impregnated by religious fervor, considering the start in 1994, the analyses and counter-analyses from various fronts, the publication of a best-selling book, and the availability of commercial systems that help you now do your own bible code analyses.

A slightly less crazy speculation comes from Clifford Pickover (although it's not clear what the original source is) that given a (countably) infinite digit sequence for PI, Shakespeare must be inevitability coded with those numbers given a suitable representation scheme. While that might be, ELSs in PI would be rarer than in human language texts, I think, because the digit probabilities are very uniform for PI after a few thousand digits, unlike most languages that tend to have a more skew distribution of letters. So ELS words would be way down deep in the code, though not quite as far along as The Bard.