Why Math Doesn't Reveal
Hidden Predictions in the Bible
Real Clear Science,
by
Ross Pomeroy
Original Article
Posted By: StormCnter,
2/9/2020 11:19:55 AM
The controversy began with a scientific paper. Israeli mathematician Eliyahu Rips, together with Yoav Rosenberg and Doron Witztum, pored through the Hebrew Book of Genesis in search of hidden codes, and they apparently found some... The names of prominent Jewish Rabbis and the dates they were active were concealed within the text, pretty incredible considering that they existed hundreds of years after the Torah was written! Rips and his colleagues extracted these names and dates using the Equidistant Letter Sequence (ELS) method. Basically, they entered all of the letters of the Torah into a computer and searched for meaningful words and numbers that arose when starting at one letter
Reply 1 - Posted by:
bamboozle 2/9/2020 11:54:15 AM (No. 313022)
This method seems to me to be similar to the idea that a large room full of chimps typing randomly on typewriters would create the full works of Shakespeare if given enough time. Gnosticism at its best?
15 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
DVC 2/9/2020 12:55:29 PM (No. 313083)
Ten thousand monkeys with ten thousand typewriters.....
I agree, the methodology is BS, totally.
10 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
Mass Minority 2/9/2020 1:46:10 PM (No. 313122)
Actually #1 its even more basic than that. It is proof of a little known (simply because it is so much more fun to believe in secret codes) fact that even in completely random events there can arise patterns and order. The problem is that unlike a real code, where once the pattern is discovered it can be used to determine other ordered sets, the pattern is not predictive. The rules used to determine one set of ordered results cannot be used to detect another set of ordered results.
Think about lottery numbers. If you look at all the powerball numbers selected over the last decades and search for patterns all kinds of things pop up. People have written books claiming to reveal these secret sequences. Problem is the existence of those sequences is meaningless. The sequences are just as random as every other meaningless sequence in the series.
I have a friend who always plays the numbers 1,2,3,4,5 in KENO. just as a reminder that the sequence 1,2,3,4,5 has exactly the same probability of coming up as any other combination of 5 numbers. We just cannot really accept that so we always pick randomly scattered numbers throughout the board in the misguided belief that this strategy increases our chances.
This kind of Biblical analysis is exactly that, patterns can be determined but the rules determined are just a different way to express random events.
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Reply 4 - Posted by:
Blue-Z-Anna 2/9/2020 2:52:25 PM (No. 313174)
A computer can not generate a random number.
It can give the appearance of randomness but it's still not truly random.
7 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
WhamDBambam 2/9/2020 3:26:59 PM (No. 313197)
IIRC, there's a similar mythology in Judaism, something called the "Kabbalah." My father, a Protestant, had several books about it.
2 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
DVC 2/9/2020 5:12:53 PM (No. 313267)
#4, yes, exactly. When I was first taking computer programming courses in college (first course was in HS), we studied "random number generation" with computer programs. The instructor immediately noted that what we were doing was creating "pseudo-random numbers" because it is impossible to get truly random numbers from a computer, since it is a definitive calculating machine, can never have any randomness.
4 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
franq 2/9/2020 5:49:44 PM (No. 313285)
I think it was Mark Twain who said "What troubles me in the Bible are not the parts I don't understand, but it is the parts that I DO understand. "
2 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Ken M. 2/9/2020 7:52:45 PM (No. 313362)
Ah, the Scientific Method. You start with a conclusion. You then select data to support your conclusion, rejecting any conflicting data, and then publish your new revelation or "scientific law", etc.
2 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
Ken M. 2/9/2020 7:55:34 PM (No. 313365)
Oops - forgot to add the /sarc off/ to the previous reply.
1 person likes this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Rumblehog 2/9/2020 8:14:12 PM (No. 313380)
Fools. They pretend to be holy searching for hidden meanings while purposely ignoring the truth of the Word of God. Can't see the forest for the twigs is somewhat applicable here. I understand the Hasidic Jews are also highly superstitious about such things.
1 person likes this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
kono 2/9/2020 9:20:24 PM (No. 313410)
That was certainly the case when I took courses on probability and on complex algorithms for my software engineering degree. The best a computer can do was called "pseudo random".
In fairness, though, a good pseudo-random number generator can come rather close to being statistically random. The 'gotcha' there is that programmers with the algorithm chops to make a good one don't come cheap. And most consumer software projects view that degree of sophistication to be an extravagance.
2 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
toddh 2/10/2020 9:52:19 AM (No. 313806)
Well, Mersenne Twister and friends are PRNGs, but computers *can* harvest entropy from more random sources, such as thermal noise and even radioactivity. Intel and AMD have hardware RNG with RDRAND, ARM has it in TrustZone, etc. A problem with hardware RNGs is they are slow compared to PRNGs. Quality takes time.
Also, in a quantum computer, a qubit that is in a 50/50 superposition will produce results more random than a coin toss.
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