Probability of the Bible Codes

Well, what I read about the fundamental flaw was simple. When you work out the probability of something you have to state the event before hand, in this case there is no event stated more than finding something interesting.

 

while I think it is a bunch of bunk, it is interesting that they did come across a cypher that has predicted the murder of Rabin, 1 month before it happened.

 

But equally crack pots predict things all the time and occasionally the odd one is right.

 

see http://cs.anu.edu.au/~bdm/dilugim/torah.html [Broken] for links to papers refuting the bible codes and other information. If you have a large enough body of randomish data (which you get by skipping some number of letters in these codes), you can turn up just about anything you like. It turns out Moby Dick predicts quite a bit itself.

 

Let's keep this thread about the math. We do not allow discussion of the Bible here.

 

You made a mistake here. The probability of having exactly two letters in sequence is [tex]\frac{1}{26^2}[/tex] and not [tex]\frac{1}{26\cdot2}[/tex] as you wrote. So the probability of finding a word of length L would be [tex]P = EC \cdot \frac {1} {26^L}[/tex] but this for a part of the Bible of length LE. Since the Bible is very big, there are many chances of finding the code.
Besides, if you don't want to find any specific word, but any meaningful arrangement of letters, the probability increases.
Finally, since Hebrew has only consonants, it is simpler to find meaningful words. You can supply how many vowels you want to our word, in order to find a meaning.

 

You have 26 possibilities of choosing your first letter. For each of these, you have 26 possibilities of choosing your second letter. So, you have [tex]26\cdot26 = 26^2[/tex] possibilities of choosing a 2 letter code and [tex]26^L[/tex] of choosing an L letter code.

As I said before, the Hebrew alphabet uses only consonants, so the words are shorter and since you can put the vowels that you want it is easier to find a meaningful word. For instance, the sequence of consonants mngfll is length 6, so there is a 1 in [tex]26^6[/tex] chance of finding it in a given text that has only consonants, while the word meaningful has 10 letters and you have only a 1 in [tex]26^10[/tex] chance of finding it.

 

Do you also have to take into account how much more often certain letters are used and calculate that into the formula? I'm not sure, just asking as far as the math portion goes.

 

there is plenty of mathematics out there to demonstrate the stasitical *insignificance* of the bible codes, can we just drop it? it is clearly nonsense. the original author even siad that he would disbelieve his own work when someone found a prediction in Moby Dick, and lo and behold someone fuond many predcitions. So, even by the litmus test of the original crank who thought it up it fails.

If you want to do it "mathematically" you need to estimate the number of possible samples. as this seems to be any "reasonably" set out distribution of the letters into grids then there are probably somewhere in the region of 10^{something incredibyl large} making a number on the scale of "larger than you can comprehend" possible grids to examine

let's make this conservative and say that we'll do this with the latin characters, so there are 26 of them. and that the bible contains, what 1,000 pages, each page has, say 15 words per line and 50 lines per page, making approx 10^7 letters in it. we are now allowed to take say 100 consecutive letters at a time, thi is sitll appox 10^7 blocks and then pick out any pattern we want from within them, now here's where it gets a bit screwy since who 's to say what a reasonable pattern is, but there are 2^100 ways of pikcing some pattern of letters out of that 100, whch is about 10^30, so, let's be reasonalbe and say that only, what one millionth of those are "interesting", so that's 10^{24} interesting patterns for each of the 10^7 blocks, so, ooh, that's again about 10^30 times we're sampling data. now even if the chances of finding some specific word or phrase was less than your DNA matching mine in a simple DNA test (which is abuot one in 10,000,000, or 1 in 10^7) that's still a very significant chance of it appearing in one of those patterns in one of those blocks. indeed you can create about anything yo want to.

of course you can take longer blocks than 100 letters, and if you read the "predicitons" they are often quite "fuzzy" and of course no one was looking for a specific code but just randomly sampling them and seeign what they coud find it all adds up to a load of baloney.

in any case messages can be found in any large body of text, which shows how much nonsense it is, and don't forget the critics foudn plenty of messages indicating that there is no such thing as god using this method in the bible too. is that not enough heuristic evidence for you or do you wish to only pick the resutls that support the claim and ignore the evidence to the contrary.

 

I'm an Orthodox Jew and I'm *very* skeptical of the Bible Codes. And besides, there are far more explicit predictions the Bible and the Talmud have made. The Talmud (together with a Rabbi from about 200 years ago), for examples, predicted Germany's chain of events (including its military setuo) in Meggillah 6 daf 2. Naturally, I'm sure you're all skeptical of this and I don't really plan or fell the need to convince anyone here of other things that, at least to me, seem beyond random chance: http://www.innernet.org.il/article.php?aid=202 [Broken] (read Purim Fest and 707 -- they aren't that long. I hope I'm not sounding too close-minded or brainwashed. It isn't like I don't believe in evolution etc. (and the Torah and modern Science are not at all mutually exclusive).