Finding Beauty in the Dissonance

The "Bible Code" is Nonsense

#!/usr/bin/env ruby -w

# Today (March 21, 2008) there was a documentary on The History
# Channel about the "Bible Code."  This "code" is where you take all
# the letters of the bible, and look through them to see if
# "interesting" words appear in the bible and their letters are
# equidistantly spaced.  For example, the word "hitler" might appear
# somewhere where there are 10 other characters between the H and the
# I, 10 characters between the I and the T, and so on.
#
# Some people on this documentary (which included professors at
# prestigious universities at CalTech) seem to take this to mean that
# the bible has some sort of divinely inspired code that can be used
# to predict the future.  I think this is complete and utter
# non-sense, and this program is meant to demonstrate that.
#
# You give this script a list of words to search for (the dictionary;
# each word is on its own line) and a piece of text to search
# through.  The program looks for each word in the dictionary in the
# text and if it finds a match, it tells you where the program started
# to find the word (the character where the first letter occured), and
# the "code length" (the number of other characters between the
# letters of the word).
#
# My claim is that "interesting" words will occur in any large enough
# piece of text, so try running this against the bible, Moby Dick,
# Paradise Lost, and so on and see what you get.
#
# Author: Chris Johnson, ccjohnson@gmail.com
# Date: March 21, 2008

# Make sure we're given two arguments
if (ARGV.length != 2) then
  puts "Use:  ./codes.rb "
  puts "   is the file containing the list of words to " +
    "search for, "
  puts "  and  is the text to search through."
  puts "E.g.: ./codes.rb dictionary.txt bible.txt"
  exit 1
end

# Make sure we can read the dictionary file
if (!File.readable? ARGV[0]) then
  puts "The dictionary file can not be read."
  exit 1
end

# Make sure we can read the search text file
if (!File.readable? ARGV[1]) then
  puts "The search text file can not be read."
  exit 1
end

# Open the files
dictionary_file = File.open(ARGV[0], "r")
text_file = File.open(ARGV[1], "r")

$dictionary = []  # The array of dictionary words
$text = ''  # One very long string containing the text

# Get our data out of the files
dictionary_file.each { |l| $dictionary « l.chomp }

text_file.each { |l| $text  « l.chomp }

# Get rid of white space and punctuation characters in the search
# text, and make everything lower case (since case shouldn't matter in
# what we're searching for)
$text.gsub!(/\s+|[;.,()]/, '').downcase!

# We'll store all of the words we find
$finds = []

$dictionary.each do |word|
  chars = word.split ''
  offset = 0

  while true do
    # Jump out if we can't even find the letter we're looking for in
    # the remaining text.
    break unless first = $text.index(chars[0], offset)
    offset = first + 1
    break unless second = $text.index(chars[1], offset)
    length = second - first
    last_find = second
    found = true  # We'll start off optimistically

    chars[2 .. chars.length].each do |char|
      if last_find + length >= $text.length or
          $text[last_find + length].chr != char then
        found = false
        break
      end

      last_find += length
    end

    if found then
      puts "The word '#{word}' was found with code length #{length} " +
        "starting at character #{first + 1}"
      $finds       break
    end
  end
end

# Report our findings
if $finds.empty? then
  puts "Nothing was found."
else
  puts "There were #{$finds.length} finds in total"
end