🚀 go-pugleaf

In <5n99cc$dd...@sunshine.atl.com>, pro...@solomons.temple.com (The Prophet) writes:
>In his newly published book, _The Bible Code_, author Michael Drosnin
>reveals astounding predictions of, among other things, the Holocaust,
>the assasination of Rabin, and a yet to be cataclysmic earthquake in
>Los Angeles (well that's a no brainer -Ed).  The quake is predicted in
>the year 2010 but by then Drosnin will have already pocketed his profit.
>
>An Israeli mathematician, Eliyahu Rips, challenges the validity of the
>predicting the future by codes embeded in text but supposedly agrees
>that there is a poorly understood code buried in the Hebrew Scriptures.
>He also states the Bible has predicted future events.  In fact it was
>Rips who found the code by running a computer analysis on the sequence
>of 304,805 letters after removing the spacing between words.
>
>Drosnin seems to equivocate in that he says absolute certainties are not
>coded but possibilities are as though they were meant to be warnings. He
>also states that codes cannot be found in other literature, such as Moby
>Dick, yet I have heard claims of these types of predictions being found
>in the Koran.
>
>The author goes on to say that discovery of these codes awaited the advent
>of the computer (duh -Ed) hence they were meant for our age which implies
>to me that he believes the hoofbeats of the approaching Apocalypse draw
>nigh.  Yet he also claims to be a non religious Jew who does not believe
>in God.  What gives?
>
>I suppose a complex predictive code could theoretically be buried in a
>long text - kind of like a fractal but using letters.  And I suppose such
>a code could be the signature of a higher entity.  But maybe humans tend
>to find codes where non exist.  And if one did exist, how would we really
>know that the discoverer was not a crackpot?
>
>This isn't the first Bible code I've heard of but it is the most complex.
>Are these codes compatible, I wonder, or do they compete in a mutually
>exclusive way?  And how do they analyze text for such codes?  Can any
>of this work be taken seriously?
>
>The Prophet

The burying of messages in otherwise innoouous plain text is
a well known cryptographic technique, although it's usually
regarded as insecure since anyone who knows the algorithm
can break it.  The advantage of it is that if someone
doesn't suspect the message is present, they may overlook
it.  Of course, one of the other many disadvantages is that
it's usually difficult to embed any significant amount of
information in something that looks like plain text (e.g.,
the information density is relatively low).  Additionally,
transcription errors can easily garble the message.

For a good review of all types of cryptography, consult
Bruce Schneier's book "Applied Cryptography" (Hard-cover
ISBN 0-471-12845-7, Paper ISBN 0-471-11709-9, John Wiley &
Sons, Inc., 1996).

One interesting fact is that normal English text contains
about one bit of information per character.  Thus, there is
plenty of redundancy which could be exploited, given the
appropriate algorithm.  Of course, other languages may
deviate from this.

Dave

P.S. Standard Disclaimer: I work for them, but I do not speak for them.