[ExI] Artificial Intelligence Cracks 4,000-Year-Old Mystery

spike spike66 at att.net
Sun Apr 26 23:33:44 UTC 2009


 >...On Behalf Of Damien Broderick
> 
> At 02:01 PM 4/26/2009 -0700, spike wrote:
> 
> >With the free downloadable word files of the bible... 
> >...and a little skill in writing macro scripts...warn us of the horrors
to come.
> 
> You've just reinvented the "Bible Code" algorithm... Damien Broderick


The idea isn't new by any means.  In my misspent youth in 1980, the college
was given a mainframe computer, an HP3000.  We had a word processor, if the
term is used very loosely.  One of the products one could get was an ASCII
file containing the entire bible.  It was expensive, so we budding
theologians decided to raise an army of volunteers and type the thing
ourselves, then compile the result.  Then we could compete with the other
company, perhaps make some money.  We did manage to get the whole thing in
there eventually, but we had nothing analogous to spell check, so I am
confident there were plenty of mistakes.  But we discussed at the time doing
these kinds of random-ish exhaustive searches, this being nearly 30 years
ago.  The computers of those days, even the mainframes, were not really up
to the task.  Then PCs came along and life as we knew it changed forever.  

It's been fun to live thru the 80s and 90s.  My son will never know what it
was like back then.

spike










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