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This strongly reminds me of the Bible Code[1], or rather of the Moby Dick Code[2] Take any large body of work, manipulate it in some way, then patterns will em

This strongly reminds me of the Bible Code[1], or rather of the Moby Dick Code[2] Take any large body of work, manipulate it in some way, then patterns will emerge that make it resemble something else. I mean seriously: they take a photo and reduce it down to a 3x3 square, arbitrarily convert the numerical values of those pixels to numbers, then take those nine numbers as 9-dimensional coordinates. The result is a surface that looks a little bit like a Klien bottle, but isn't really, since the surface is 4-dimensional instead of 2. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_code [2] http://cs.anu.edu.au/people/bdm/dilugim/moby.html http://cs.anu.edu.au/people/bdm/dilugim/moby.html

deleted 15y ago
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tel 15y ago
Not really. Bible/Moby Dick codes rely on the probability of not seeing any pattern descending to zero as you go to infinite search spaces. This is more of a structural result like an average. Per point: the probability of not seeing any finite string of Hs and Ts in a random, unbiased sequence of coin flips goes to zero (thus the Moby Dick Code), however the probability of the average, (number of heads)/(number of flips), differing from 0.5 by any amount goes to zero (structural result). In this case, the Klein bottle situation isn't that crazy since it's a fairly simple way of orienting a locally 2 dimensional space that just happens to be embeddable only in spaces of 4 or more dimensions.
aGHz 15y ago
This is a terribly incorrect trivialization of the work they did. The idea is not to observe some meaningless pattern emerge. Instead, they're trying to describe the statistics of random 3x3 pixels taken from photographs of nature (in fact, only of the luminosity of each pixel, hence the black-and-white photos). At a first thought, you'd expect this to be completely random, but it looks like there is a certain statistical structure to it. You only find this structure far-fetched because you're reading a blogger's vulgarization of the scientific paper whose concepts you're not familiar with. Unlike the unreasonable bible and Moby Dick codes, this has practical applications in image manipulation and compression.

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

tel 15y ago

Not really. Bible/Moby Dick codes rely on the probability of not seeing any pattern descending to zero as you go to infinite search spaces. This is more of a structural result like an average. Per point: the probability of not seeing any finite string of Hs and Ts in a random, unbiased sequence of coin flips goes to zero (thus the Moby Dick Code), however the probability of the average, (number of heads)/(number of flips), differing from 0.5 by any amount goes to zero (structural result). In this case, the Klein bottle situation isn't that crazy since it's a fairly simple way of orienting a locally 2 dimensional space that just happens to be embeddable only in spaces of 4 or more dimensions.

aGHz 15y ago

This is a terribly incorrect trivialization of the work they did. The idea is not to observe some meaningless pattern emerge. Instead, they're trying to describe the statistics of random 3x3 pixels taken from photographs of nature (in fact, only of the luminosity of each pixel, hence the black-and-white photos). At a first thought, you'd expect this to be completely random, but it looks like there is a certain statistical structure to it. You only find this structure far-fetched because you're reading a blogger's vulgarization of the scientific paper whose concepts you're not familiar with. Unlike the unreasonable bible and Moby Dick codes, this has practical applications in image manipulation and compression.