Thursday, June 30, 2011

You Had Me at "Algorithm"

When I opened my browser today, there was an article titled An Israeli Algorithm Sheds Light On the Bible. Well since it was about an algorithm {math} and the Bible, I was intrigued...

The short of it is this algorithm has been applied to texts and it can sort out different authors. For example they took two books of the Bible that are know to be written by different authors, condescend them into one, and it sorted them out almost perfectly. The probable controversy of this comes when they apply it to the first five books of the bible, the books of Moses, that were supposedly spoken by God and transcribed by Moses, but the algorithm shows different authors. For me personally this is not foundational faith shattering, even the Jewish creators of the algorithm said that it is not beyond God to speak in different voices.

I am pretty intrigued with the application of the algorithm on other texts or uses. They discussed how it could be used in law enforcement to identify suspects, and businesses to create seamless written documents where there are multiple contributors. Even another tool to detect plagiarism in colleges.

Learned: I am continually amazed at math, at its applications, and how amazingly brilliant people are to come up with stuff like this.

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