Dror Bar-Natan: "Bible Codes": The Gans Report

Posted Sep. 4, 2002
Updated May 14, 2003

* For the past several years I was a member of a committee at the Hebrew University whose mandate was to re-run, in an as objective manner as possible, an experiment originally claimed by Harold Gans to provide very strong evidence for the existence of "Bible codes". The committee had fair or even better than fair representation for the supporters of "Bible Codes". Indeed, the members of the committee were:

Prof. Robert (Yisrael) J. Aumann: Chair of the committee. A distinguished economist and mathematician and the recipient of numerous prizes and honors. One of the main people who pushed for the study of "Bible codes" and for the publication of the original WRR paper on the subject.
Prof. Dror Bar-Natan: Myself.
Prof. Harry (Hillel) Furstenberg: A distinguished mathematician and the recipient of numerous prizes and honors. Co-author of a 1989 letter by four distinguished mathematicians supportive of "Bible codes" research.
Prof. Isaak Lapides: A chemist invited to the committee by Prof. Rips.
Prof. Eliyahu Rips: A distinguished mathematician. The inventor and a leading advocate of "Bible Codes". The initiator of many of the standard methods used by Bible codes "researchers" today.

At the moment I don't have the time to write a full documented report. So let me jump straight to the results. The committee designed two experiments to evaluate Gans' claims; the "fresh" experiment and the "replicative" experiment. The fresh experiment is completely fresh - except for the theme, it was designed as a completely new experiment and the design was not influenced by whatever design choices were made by Gans. The replicative experiment followed Gans' footsteps as closely as possible in setting the rules and the procedures, except that the final collection of the data was delegated to human experts rather than to encyclopedias which were not optimally designed to provide the information we were seeking. The data for both experiments (i.e., the lists of place-names associated with some 66 famous rabbis) was produced by external experts selected by Harry Furstenberg, who was deemed "the most objective" committee member by the other members of the committee. The identity of these external experts was not known to the other committee members when the experiments were performed^$. To prevent the possibility of bias, the experts were not told how the data they have gathered would be analyzed.

Anyway, here are the results of the analysis^#:

The Fresh Experiment	The Replicative Experiment
463,406 / 1,000,000	578,075 / 1,000,000

Some of the readers of this page may not be sufficiently immersed in this subject to understand what these numbers mean. Ok, here's the meaning, plain and short:

A Complete Failure of the "Codes"

Further resources:

Barry Simon's earlier attempted replication of the Gans experiment (also failed).
Brendan McKay's page on "the rise and fall of the Gans experiment".
Findings of the Committee to Investigate the Gans-Inbal Results on Equidistant Letter Sequences in Genesis by committee members Prof. Robert (Yisrael) J. Aumann and Prof. Harry (Hillel) Furstenberg (Discussion Paper #364, Center for the Study of Rationality, the Hebrew University.

Hillel Furstenberg, Dror Bar-Natan, Yisrael Aumann, Eliyahu Rips and Isaak Lapides, 1998.

Footnotes.

* I am posting this report despite my earlier claims (1, 2) that I've quit the silly subject of "Bible codes". I was a member of the "Gans committee" when I've decided to quit, and I did not want to leave behind an unfinished project. Therefore I remained a member and I remain committed to publishing the results of our work. But I remain uninterested in continued involvement in the subject, and I fully expect this document, when completed, to be the last document I will have published regarding Bible codes.

$ I now know that they were Prof. M. Ben-Sasson, Mr. A. David, Prof. A. Grossman, Dr. M. Rafeld, Dr. R. Reiner and Prof. M. Rosman.

# The mechanical computation of these "permutation test" scores was carried out by Brendan McKay (a "codes" skeptic) in July 2002 and confirmed to within expected experimental errors by Doron Witztum (a "codes" believer).