the bible code: a riddle and its solution maya bar-hillel the hebrew university 2nd mini-conference...
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The Bible Code: A Riddle and its Solution
Maya Bar-HillelThe Hebrew University
2nd mini-conference on“ Rationality, Behavior, Experiment”
Moscow, September 1–3, 2010
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My collaborators
Gil Kalai
Dror Bar-Natan
Brendan McKay
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Doron Witztum
Ilya Rips
Yoav Rosenberg
The riddle
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The riddle:
Equidistant letter sequences in the book of Genesis. Doron Witztum, Eliyahu Rips, Yoav Rosenberg. 1994 Statistical Science, 9(3), 429-438.
The solution:
Solving the Bible Code puzzle. Brendan McKay, Dror Bar-Natan, Maya Bar-Hillel, Gil Kalai. 1999, Statistical Science, 14(2), 149-173.
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Rabbi Dov Weissmandel
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33 letters in a row
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The Added Dimensionby Doron Witztum
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Diabetes; insulin; pancreas
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“Famous Rabbis” Experiment
Word pairs: names and dates of famous rabbis
Source: Margaliot encyclopedia
Criterion for inclusion: 3 columns and up of text
Mentions of birthday or yaarzeit (death anniversary)
(In Hebrew, dates are written with letters, not numbers.)
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Procedure34 such entries were found.
1. Find names and dates as ELSs
2. For each name-date pair, find the “tightest” display
3. Calculate name-date distance in this display
4. Obtain set of distances
5. Are they “remarkably” close?
WRR’s answer: A resounding YES. Original “significance”: 10-to-the-minus-29
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Kahzdan to Prof. Persi Diaconis (then at Harvard, now at Stanford)
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Persi’s suggestions :
Calculate “statistical significance” in a meaningful and appropriate way –
The permutation test
Do it on new list (but same source, same criteria, same protocol, same calculations) .
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“In order to avoid any conceivable appearance of having fitted the tests to the data, it was later decided to use a fresh sample, without changing anything else” (p. 431)
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WRR found in Margaliot 32 rabbis with 1.5-3 columns of text who met the inclusion criterion for dates.
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Although WRR did not publish the result of the permutation test for the first list of rabbis, we later found out that it comes in 40th in a field of one million.
And where did the second list come in?
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4th place in a race of one
million
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End of part 1 – The riddle.
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Prof. Aumann (almost 20 years later, 2005 Nobel Prize winner in Economics)
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“challenging puzzle”
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Next photo courtesy of Dror Bar-Natan
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Our self-set goal:
Make a list for War and Peace that would meet Persi’s requirements.
Challenge:
Show that our list can be at least as successful as WRR’s was in Genesis.
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The list for War and Peace came in 12th place …
Among ten million permutations
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“the puzzle has been solved”
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End of part 2 – The Solution
“Persi’s challenge” to WRR was: “Prove the existence of the Bible Code in Genesis without wiggle room [Barry Simon’s term]”,
Our experiment shows that enough wiggle room was left to similarly prove the existence of a bible code in War and Peace.
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7. During the years of the committee’s work, I became convinced that the data is too complex and
ambiguous, and its analysis involves too many judgment calls, to allow reaching meaningful
scientific conclusions.
8. The matter of manipulation played a central role in the evaluation of the research, and also in the
research itself: the committee’s experiment was designed to avoid, at all costs, the remotest
possibility of manipulation. I myself have gotten to know the people on both sides fairly well, and
find the accusations of manipulation hard to believe; everyone involved seems sincere, and also
to understand the issue of manipulation—which makes unintentional manipulation unlikely.
Nevertheless, the basic thesis of the research is a priori even harder to believe than the
possibility of manipulation. Moreover, matters of personal trust cannot be considered a legitimate
part of a scientific analysis; results must be repeatable and objective, and their validation cannot
depend on the analyst’s personal assessment of the researchers’ honesty.
11. We come finally to the bottom line: A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly
improbable. Though the original work of Witztum, Rips, and Rosenberg, and that of Gans,
established a prima facie case for the existence of the codes, this case was undermined by the
work of the “opponents” (see Point 6 above). Research conducted under my own supervision
failed to confirm the existence of the codes—though it also did not establish their non-existence.
So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable.