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

My collaborators

Gil Kalai

Dror Bar-Natan

Brendan McKay

Doron Witztum

Ilya Rips

Yoav Rosenberg

The riddle

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.

Rabbi Dov Weissmandel

33 letters in a row

The Added Dimensionby Doron Witztum

Diabetes; insulin; pancreas

“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.)

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

Kahzdan to Prof. Persi Diaconis (then at Harvard, now at Stanford)

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) .

“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)

WRR found in Margaliot 32 rabbis with 1.5-3 columns of text who met the inclusion criterion for dates.

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?

4th place in a race of one

million

End of part 1 – The riddle.

Prof. Aumann (almost 20 years later, 2005 Nobel Prize winner in Economics)

“challenging puzzle”

Next photo courtesy of Dror Bar-Natan

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.

The list for War and Peace came in 12th place …

Among ten million permutations

“the puzzle has been solved”

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.

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.