Replies

The following good points are available in more than abstract form at the link following:
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A Review of the Attempts to Invalidate the Torah Codes
English Version
Hebrew Version

MBBK's Study of Variations
Abstract:
A paper of McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel and Kalai (MBBK) in the Statistical Science (1999) made the extraordinary claim that the result of Witztum, Rips and Rosenberg (WRR), which was published in the same journal in 1994, was obtained by deceit. The main statistical work presented in MBBK's paper is the "study of variations", aimed at proving that WRR's result was obtained through "tuning" of their data.
In reply, we argue that MBBK's case is fatally defective, indeed that their results merely reflect on the choices made in designing their "study of variations", collecting the data and presenting the results. We present extensive evidence in support of that conclusion. In particular, we report on many experiments of our own, in which we applied their "study of variations" to several lists of data, some of them "tuned" and some of them not "tuned" – and the results are the exact opposite of the expectation of MBBK's thesis.

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http://www.torahcodes.co.il/debate1.htm

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and:

Concerning the Choices of Dates for WRR's Rabbis Samples
This article scrutinizes MBBK's claim that WRR directly optimized the results by exploiting "beneficial" choices pertaining to the dates. Careful examination of all the choices indicates WRR's perfect integrity. Alternative choices, based on MBBK's suggestions, would have yielded better results –– sometimes by a factor of 2 or 3, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100, and sometimes by a factor of tens of thousands.
All this starkly contradicts MBBK's report and the impression created by their article.

via:

http://www.torahcodes.co.il/date_hb.htm

The first parts of which are here:

Bs"d Draft. Adar 7, 5761 (3 March 01)

Concerning the Choices of Dates
for WRR's Rabbis Samples

By Doron Witzum

Index:
Introduction
Part A: Direct Optimization
Chapter I. The First Sample: Was There Any Optimization Through Dates?
Chapter II. The Second Sample: Was There Any Optimization Through Dates?
Chapter III. An Instructive "Replication" of MBBK
Appendix

The choice to add/remove/correct dates
The choice to write the day and the month, but not the year
Choices concerning month names and their spelling
The choice to not specify dates by "special days"
The choice to write 15th or 16th in two ways and not only one.
The choice of date formations.
An instructive "replication" produced by MBBK.
Acknowledgements
Bibliography

Introduction:
WRR's experiment concerning the hidden Genesis code, (publicized in Statistical Science [1]), is the subject of the critical paper of MBBK (McKay, Bar-Natan, Bar-Hillel & Kalai): "Solving the Bible Code Puzzle," in that same journal [2]. They discuss (Section 5 and Appendix B) the dates used in WRR's samples, claiming that WRR had many choices pertaining to these dates. Their argument is twofold:

1. They claim that WRR exploited "freedom" in choosing dates to directly optimize their results.
In this respect, they claim that WRR always (or almost always) made choices that improve their results.

2. MBBK used these alternative choices as "variations" in their own "study of variations".
In this context they claim that apparent deliberate optimization of dates to improve results, is not necessarily from deliberate optimization of dates, but rather indirect evidence that WRR directly optimized the appellations.

In their discussion MBBK mixed up the two perspectives, but we will deal with them separately, and thus clarify this issue.
In part A we will discuss perspective 1: Did WRR actually exploit "beneficial" choices to directly optimize their results or not.
In part B we will discuss perspective 2: Does the analysis of the variations pertaining to dates indicate optimization through the appellations?

Part A: Direct Optimization

Introduction
In this section we will scrutinize MBBK's claim that WRR directly optimized the results by exploiting "beneficial" choices pertaining to the dates.
Concerning direct optimization, remember that originally P1 and P2 were the sole statistics used to measure the success of L1 and L2. Therefore, any optimization of dates must have been in relation to P1 or P2, or, more probably, in relation to Min(P1-P2). Therefore, it is most sensible to examine the situation with these statistics. Instead, MBBK present their results in relation to other statistics. Our article [3] (Chap. 3) already points out that this grossly distorts the real results. This article will also give some clear examples of this.
The choices presented by MBBK are far less relevant to the second rabbis sample, L2, than to the first sample, L1. This is because the conditions of the second experiment were already defined by the first experiment, leaving little room for choice in the second experiment. Therefore we will discuss the two samples separately.

Chapter one will discuss "optimization" through date choices in L1.

Chapter two will discuss the same concerning L2. This discussion will be brief and simple because only one kind of choice is relevant in L2.

Chapter three will evaluate MBBK's "replication" which used alternative dates.

Chapter I
The First Sample: Was There Any Optimization Through Dates?

In Section 5 of their article (pgs. 155-156), MBBK list the following possible date choices:

The choice to correct/add/remove dates.

The choice to write the day and month without the year.

The choice to use specific names of months (and not others) and specific spellings (and not others).

The choice of not "specifying dates by special days such as religious holidays".

The choice to write days falling on the 15th or 16th in two different forms and not only in one.

The choice of certain forms of dates.

We will explain the background of each choice, and investigate whether it would have improved or worsened WRR's original results. To keep things brief, most details are in the appendix and only conclusions are discussed here.

Careful examination of all the choices indicates WRR's perfect integrity. Alternative choices, based on MBBK's suggestions, would have yielded better results –– sometimes by a factor of 2 or 3, sometimes by a factor of 10 or 100, and sometimes by a factor of tens of thousands.
All this starkly contradicts MBBK's report and the impression created by their article.

An example:
Regarding choice 6 mentioned above, "the choice of certain forms of dates", we write in the appendix (Section 6):
Most of the dates pertaining to L1 are given in Encyclopedia Margaliot in standard forms and not specified by "special days". Of the 37 dates in L1, 30 are given in standard forms. The Encyclopedia uses the following four standard forms:

"éøùú 'à" .

"éøùú 'àá" .

"éøùúá 'à" .

"éøùúá 'àá" .

The linguist Ya'akov Orbach o.b.m., WRR's linguistic advisor, suggested using the three standard forms a-c. We do not know his reasons, and we specifically do not know whether he examined or considered the forms used by Encyclopedia Margaliot. (Perhaps it is just a coincidence, but the date forms used by Encyclopedia Hebraica for the rabbis of L1 are precisely forms a-c.).

MBBK wrote concerning this:

"To write the day and the month, WRR used three forms, approximately corresponding to the English forms "May 1st," "1st of May" and "on May 1st". They did not use the obvious "on 1st of May," which is frequently used by Margaliot…" (Pg. 155)
They also wrote:

"The most obvious variation would have been to add the form akin to "on 1st of May". It gives the score [1.2, 2.2; 0.6, 16.4]." (Pgs. 168-169)
We examined MBBK's "most obvious" choice of including the fourth form, d, as well. Let us check the following choices:
Forms a-c (used by WRR).

Forms a-d.

continued at the link with this conclusion just before Chapt II:

Conclusion:
The main conclusion is that L1 was made with integrity.
Note that MBBK investigated L1 solely to see whether it was compiled honestly or not. As they write in Section 3 of their article:

"WRR's first list of rabbis and their appellations and dates appeared in WRR94 too, but no results are given except some histograms of c(w, w') values. Since WRR have consistently maintained that their experiment with the first list was performed just as properly as their experiment with the second list, we will investigate both." (Pg. 154)
Therefore they must accept our conclusions and all that they imply. Now that WRR's integrity is proven, the L1 results must also be evaluated with the evidence for a hidden Genesis code.

with these paragraphs further on at that link and doc:

Conclusion:
The above is unequivocal evidence that WRR acted honestly and exploited no "freedom in date choices" to improve their result. There was no direct optimization through date choices for L2.
This contradicts MBBK's implications, and eliminates their rationale to exploit date choices in "imitation" of WRR.

Chapter III
An Instructive "Replication" of MBBK

We saw that MBBK's report of WRR's date choices is distorted and misleading. They claim that WRR dishonestly improved their results– –but the opposite is true. This is not surprising because distortions and deceptions cloud all the issues of their entire article, as we already proved [3]-[8]. Now we will give another example: It concerns the manner in which MBBK conducted their "replication" concerning dates.

They write:
"As an aside, a universal truth in our investigation is that whenever we use data completely disjoint from WRR's data the phenomenon disappears completely. For example, we ran the experiment using only month names (including the Biblical ones) that were not used by WRR, and found that none of the permutation ranks were less than 0.11 for any of P1_4, for either list." (Pg. 168)
MBBK report a replication utilizing only month names not used by WRR, claim that it failed, and claim that the same happened to all their replications.

But close scrutiny of MBBK's list of "new" month names (details in the Appendix, Sec. 7) reveals many flaws:

The list is not closed.

Four of its 12 names are incorrectly spelled.

Four additional names are "Biblical" and the way they are used by MBBK is most dubious.

In addition, the design of MBBK's experiment's is flawed:

For L1: Dates based MBBK's month names apply to only 10 personalities out of 34.
For L2: They apply to only 15 personas out of 32.
These flaws are fatal: For example, eliminating the cases disqualified by flaws b-c leaves only three month names suitable for MBBK's experiment.

Conclusions:

The results of MBBK's "replication" are worthless.

Even if the flawed data is corrected, no replication can be prepared based on MBBK's dates, because:

Only three suitable names will remain.

The set from which the names were extracted is not closed.

Yes, we indeed subscribe to MBBK's assertion that:

"As an aside, a universal truth in our investigation is that whenever we use [wrong] data completely disjoint from WRR's data the phenomenon disappears completely."

Note that we have added the word "wrong" which MBBK has "erroneously" omitted.
(Similar criticism pertaining to their other "replications" is given in [9]).

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More items from this link:

http://www.torahcodes.co.il/emanuel/eman_hb.htm

New Statistical Evidence for A Genuine Code in Genesis
This article reveals that:

The main "replication" presented in MBBK's Stat. Sc. paper, was actually deceptively fabricated as an "independent experiment" to present it's complete failure.

An experiment based on data given by MBBK's own expert shows that WRR's original result was not achieved through "tuning" of names and appellations.

. . . .

We describe all this not to criticize Dr Emanuel, who was most polite and candid, but to show the difficulty in getting uncensored information.

We thoroughly examined the material which included the lists publicized by MBBK, the information received from Dr Emanuel during our conversations with him [3] [5]-[8], and various excerpts where MBBK quoted their expert. All this made clear that their experiment was indeed important and instructive. We drew the following significant conclusions:

There is statistical evidence of (to quote MBBK), a "genuine ELS phenomenon in Genesis".

What MBBK did concerning the list ascribed to Dr Emanuel and used for their main experiment appears to be a simple deception. (This is yet another example, among many others [9]-[13], of practices which cast grave doubt on MBBK's integrity.)

In this paper, we will examine the following:
Chapter I will discuss MBBK's procedures. Chapter II will deal with statistical evidence for the codes which can be deduced from Dr Emanuel's work. In Chapter III we will investigate the source of the differences between Emanuel's and Havlin's lists.

Chapter I. The Masquerade of Scientific Research

In this chapter we will discover that MBBK's seemingly "independent experiment" was actually conducted by methods that seem like utter deception. MBBK's purpose was twofold: To create conditions which would lead to their experiment failing, and at the same time to conceal an important fact––that in reality Emanuel's real data indicates that WRR's success was due not to "cooking" of names and appellations (as MBBK claim), but to the presence of a genuine code (as we will show in chapter II).

Note: In this chapter we will not criticize Dr Emanuel's data. The following discussion will treat his data as if it is correct. Also, we will use MBBK's terminology "corrected dates", although we do not agree that this is necessarily true.

1. Games people play:

. . . .

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And also at:

http://www.torahcodes.co.il/debate1.htm

Concerning the Statistical Test that was Published in our Paper in Statistical Science
MBBK claim in their Stat. Sc. paper that WRR used a permutation test that differed from that agreed upon with Prof. Diaconis, and this was done behind his back.
This response shows that their claim is simply false.

English Version [works at the above link]

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A New Measurement of the "Famous Rabbis" Sample
Here we report on a new application of a different method of randomization to the measurement of the significance of the correlation in the famous Rabbis sample. The measured significance was found to be 0.0000009. Note that MBBK's complaints concerning the original permutation test – are irrelevant here.

English Version-Hebrew Words In Hebrew Font

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Qx:
CLEARLY, FJ290 a significance of 0.0000009 is extremely beyond the highest normally used in most very rigorous scientific studies.

I realize that TRUE FACTS don't seem to be the issue for naysayers--extremely statistically significant FACTS, BIBLICAL FACTS, or otherwise.

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