From: yogi@cs.ubc.ca (Yossi Gil)
Subject: Re: Discovery
Organization: Computer Science, University of B.C., Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Date: Sat, 25 Jul 92 15:08:40 GMT

nmiller@starbase.trincoll.edu (norman miller) writes:

>The silly season is with us again and very clown, mountebank
>and snake-oil salesman in the land is looking for suckers.
>Not to mention the gullible fools who repeat the nonsense,
>complete with sound effects (gee whiz, no kidding, wow).

I see no reason for the strong language and the flames. At worst, the
discovery project is not much different than the belief that the Bible
was written by God and that it carries some divine message. People are
entitled to hold their own religious beliefs. I don't share these beliefs.
If I can read between your lines, you don't have theses beliefs either.
This is no reason to claim that these people are scams.

>Someone wrote the other day asking for precise details.  He 
>will never get them.  He will ask for concrete examples of
>some of these spectacular findings.  He will never get them.

Well, this depends on what you he is looking for. If he is looking for
godly hints, it may very well be that he will never find them. 

On the other hand, I know that there was a project of finding
"interesting" arithmetical progressions in certain chapters of the bible.
Prof. Ilya Rips, a mathematician from the Hebrew University, tried to
use a computer to prove that certain chapters of the bibles have a large
number of occurrences of certain words in arithmetical progressions.
He built a probabilistic model for this, and compared his results 
with the expected number of occurrences of these words. From what he
claims his findings are statistically significant.

I am not to judge whether his experiments and conclusions are valid.
Someone had told me that another mathematician from Weizman Institute
(was it M. Shimshoni?) was trying to prove Prof. Rips wrong.
Apparently, the two had a series of papers on the topic, and from
what I heard this was a serious discussion in a scientific level. 

Now, and here is my main point, it could very well be that Rips was
right and that his rival was wrong. This would not prove anything about
the divine source of the bible. For example, it is not too difficult to
compute the probability of a first verse starting with Alef (the first
letter in the Hebrew alphabet), the second verse starting with Beit
(the second letter) and so on until the 22nd verse which starts with
Taf (the last letter). Whichever model you pick, you will find that
this probability is vanishingly small. Yet, there are more than one
chapter in the bible that observe this pattern. So what? The author (be
it mortal or immortal) picked his words as to meet this pattern.  Now,
arithmetical progressions are not much different. These pattern could be
read upside down if the text is written in fixed pitch. It is known that
the author(s) of these ancient texts did use care when selecting their
words. Much more care than us posting usenet messages. Most of us have
to learn to  appreciate the rhymes and other subtle issues in old poetry.
There is a certain genre of poems: 15 chapters, each chapter is 14
lines, the last chapter being the first line of the first chapter,
the 2nd line of the 2nd chapter and so on until the 14th line of the
14 chapter.

So, suppose that the word AHARON shows in an arithmetical progressions
of a certain chapter with very high frequency which cannot be explained
by any statistical model? Couldn't it be that a human author picked his
words right to achieve this affect?

>The people behind this scam also have a controlling interest 
>in supermarket weeklies.

Weeklies such as the National Enquirer, the Star come up with titles
such as "a half man half horse baby was born to a 90 yrs old woman",
"the dead sea scolls include a cure for aids", etc.  These weeklies
hardly need any proof for what they publish. They would never to go to
such trouble as the discovery project. 

>Norman Miller

Yossi Gil
--
Joseph (Yossi) Gil                 {alberta,uw-beaver,uunet}!ubc-cs!yogi
Dept. of Computer Science          yogi@cs.ubc.ca (cs.ubc.ca=137.82.8.5)
6356 Agricultural Road., Univ. of B.C.,             Tel: +1-604-822-8175
Vancouver, British Columbia, V6T 1Z2, Canada.       Fax: +1-604-822-5485