"Bible" algorithm

Software developed by an Israeli team revealed new details about the Bible. A new computer program analyzes the style and word choice of certain parts of the text, making sure it was written by one or more authors.

Applied to the Bible, his algorithm has confirmed what the erudite already established - that in Scripture there are many different 'voices'. Israeli software - part of the study sub-areas of artificial intelligence, known as author attributions, has a wide range of potential applications - from criminal investigation to the development of new computer programs for writers.

Bible in size and complexity presents a real challenge for the creators of the new algorithm. For millions of Jews and Christians, God is the author of the basic text of the Hebrew Bible - Torah, also known as the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses.

Centuries of Bible study, however, revealed that the Scriptures are written by several authors whose work is distinguished by specific linguistic styles, ideological patterns and names for God.

Today, researchers divided the Bible into two parts - one for those who believe that it was written by one or a group and who are called "priests" tradition, while the rest belongs to. no priest tradition. Researchers have researched and analyzed the texts to determine which parts belong to which group the author.

Who wrote the Bible

By using new software on the Pentateuch was found almost identical distribution of the "priests" and "nesvešteničko" tradition. By matching software analysis with the traditional academic division occurred in 90 percent of cases.

"But what are the erudite have taken years of patient work, computer software is carried out in a matter of minutes," said computer science professor and study leader Moshe Koppel of Bar Ilan University in Tel Aviv.

"Automated method we managed to do a brief overview of several centuries of hard manual labor," the Israeli team in a study presented last week at the annual meeting of the Association of Computer Linguistics in Portland, in the U.S. state of Oregon.

The part in which a computer program differs from the analysis could erudite researchers to provide new, interesting directions.

In the first chapter of the book Being, for example, are usually believed to belong to "high priest" legend, but the software suggests the opposite conclusion.

Similarly, the book of Isaiah the prophet believed to have been written by two authors and the other continued to write of 39 chapter. The results confirm the software that the book has two authors, but others suggest that the author began writing six chapters earlier, ie. of 33 chapter.

In the past decade, researchers have increasingly used computer programs for searching and comparison of biblical texts. Israeli newspaper software is that it applies the scientific criteria by using technological tools that in many ways more powerful than the human mind, says Michael Sigal at Hebrew University who was not involved in the project.

Before your software applied to the Pentateuch and other books of the Bible, the researchers first had to perform a test which will prove that the algorithm is able to distinguish one author from another.

For this test are randomly mixed parts of the book of Ezekiel and Jeremiah in an article which were then analyzed with new software. Program text is "almost perfect" sort of appropriate units.

The identification of writers

Other researchers have used similar algorithms to identify unknown writers. During the 90-ies, a professor of English literature from Donald Foster Vasar College has managed to thus reveal the name of the anonymous author of a book using the minor details such as punctuation.

In 2003, Kopel was with a team of researchers developed software that could have almost 100 percent to determine whether the author is male or female. On that occasion they have found that women use far more personal and demonstrative pronouns men.

The success of this project encouraged the debate on how the poles shape our thinking and communication. Such studies have potential application in the conduct of criminal investigations by the police to help detect cheaters and plagiarism.

Since the analysis can determine the age and gender, new algorithms to be able to help advertisers better target their advertising campaigns to target groups.

New software could be used for checking the authenticity of texts, for example, Shakespeare's play, in order to definitively resolve the question of their authorship or co-authoring potential.