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in one of his texts, martin gardner presents the ultimate bible code: Bible.

"Select any of the 10 words in the first verse: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth'"

"Count the number of letters in the chosen word and call this number n. Then go to the word that is n\ words ahead. (For example, if you picked the first the, go to created?) Now count the number of letters in this new word—call it HI—then jump ahead another «2 words. Continue until your chain of words enters the third verse of Genesis." Dr. Googol nodded. "Okay, I am in the third verse." "On what word does your count end?" "God!"

iam looking for a mathematical/statistical explanation for this phenomena ...

Humberto José Bortolossi
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  • Not sure if your question is exactly a duplicate of this one, but they're very related: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/245760/a-coupling-card-trick-in-durretts-book – Aaron Montgomery Jul 08 '22 at 12:55
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    https://www.ams.org/publicoutreach/feature-column/fcarc-mulcahy6 might be helpful. It talks about the Kruskal Count. Searching for Kruskal Count on stackexchange also yields helpful answers: https://stackexchange.com/search?q=kruskal+count – Barry Carter Jul 08 '22 at 13:23
  • Let enumerate words in bible and let $i$-th word length is $l_i$. Then consider 10 sequences $(a_j)$ ($j$ from 1 to 10) defined by $a_{j,1}=j$ and $a_{j,k+1}=a_{j,k}+l_{k}$. If two sequences have common element (possibly with different index), then all elements starting from this element are common. Probability that such stochastic sequences have no common element depends on length: larger the length, smaller the probability. Then if we consider large enough sequence of words we can be almost sure that 10 sequences are intersecting, then they all are coming to the same ending. – Ivan Kaznacheyeu Jul 11 '22 at 10:01

2 Answers2

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So first off, it should go without saying that whether this works depends on which Bible translation you use. It seems to work with this one, so we'll go with that.

If you choose two different starting words, and at any point they land on the same word, they will land on the same words from that point on. Thus, paths through the first two verses of Genesis using this method can merge, but never diverge. Since the words of Genesis probably weren't set up to be a special case for this problem, eventually all paths from a given set of words merge.

In this particular case, by the time you leave the first verse, only four paths remain:

  1. "In", "beginning", "the(2)" and "the(3)" land on verse 2's "the(1)"
  2. "the(1)", "created", and "and" land on verse 2's "and(1)"
  3. "God" and "heaven" land on verse 2's "earth"
  4. "earth" is on its own at "without", though it is the next word in path 1.

Paths 1 and 2 merge in verse 2 at "and(4)" and path 3 merges in at "the(5)". From this point on, all paths will land on the same words, and as it happens the next word in all paths is verse 3's "God".

Since we start with 10 paths, after 10 words only 4 paths remain, and after 38 words only 1 remains, we can estimate that paths have about a 6% chance per word to merge.

eyeballfrog
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I'VE DISCOVRED YHIS IS SIMILAR A CARD TRICK CALLED KUSKAL COUNT.

he principle at work here can be explained in terms of Markov processes, and was discovered by Princeton physicist Martin Kruskal. We recommend an online discussion of the mathematics and a computer simulation, both related to the paper On Kruskal's Principle'' by Wayne Haga & Sinai Robins (from Organic Mathematics (Burnaby, BC, 1995), Canadian Math Society Conference Proceedings 20 (AMS, 1997).

MORE HERE: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiW9bOglO_4AhVhA7kGHWcyAy4QFnoECCcQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fweb.northeastern.edu%2Fseigen%2F11Magic%2FKruskalsCount%2FKruskal%2527sCount.html&usg=AOvVaw0MRPcCmZLfRk7B6QpQgsd0

Humberto José Bortolossi
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