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| Photo Courtesy of clarita/morguefile |
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| Excerpt from the Book of Genesis |
1. Select any word in the first verse: "In the beginning God created the heaven and
the Earth".
2. Count the number of letters of the chosen word. The number of letters in the word will
determine the number of jump for the next word.
For example, if you choose the word "God", there are three letters (G, o, d). Hence, jump
three words from "God" - that will be the word "heaven".
3. Continue the same process until you reach the third verse.
In the above example, "heaven" has 6 letters. Jump 6 words and you will reach "earth" in
the second verse. "Earth" has 5 letters, jump 5 words and reach "void". Next will be
"upon", then "the", and then "the". Next is "God", then "the", then "the", then finally reach
the third verse.
4. Stop when you reach the third verse.
In the example above, which word did you land in the third verse? It is "GOD".
You can choose another word in the first verse and do the same process. In any choice of
word, you will always land in the word "GOD" in the third verse. Try it!
MATHEMATICAL CONNECTION:
According to Martin Gardner, in his work "Mathematical Games", each of the chain of words will always end on GOD. It is a result of the "Kruskal count", named after the mathematician Martin Kruskal who discovered it. It is a probabilistic concept that ca be applied to some magic tricks (most of it are on card tricks) and code-breaking.
Gardner points out that when the total number of words in a text is significantly greater than the number of letters in the longest word, it is likely that any two arbitrarily started word chains will intersect at a keyword. After the intersection point, the chains become identical. As the text lengthens, the likelihood of the intersection increases.
1 comments:
thank you for this :)
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