Auschwitz
In 1997, Doron Witztum made a
statement in which he mentioned an experiment he did with Hitler's concentration camps. The most famous of these camps was Auschwitz and the experiment examined the association of ELSs of Auschwitz with the names of the subcamps as listed in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust. Witztum stated that the probability due to chance that the associations of the ELSs of Auschwitz with the ELSs of the subcamps would be as close as was observed was 1/1,000,000. Professor McKay attempted a replication of that experiment using a control population of letter permuted key words. The result was not statistically significant. We also attempted a replication. The Hebrew spelling of the key words for Auschwitz and its subcamps that we used can be found
here.
The experiment was conducted in accordance with one of our standard experimental protocols to test the Null hypothesis against the Alternative hypothesis that nearly all the sub-camps having ELSs in the Chumash have at least one their ELSs in a more compact meeting with the key word Auschwitz than expected by chance.
Experimental Protocol
Text |
The Five Books of Moses; the Chumash |
Skip Specification |
Expected Number of ELS = 10 |
Resonance Specification |
Maximum ELS row skip on a cylinder = 10
Maximum ELS column skip on a cylinder = 10 |
Monkey Text Control Population |
ELS random placement |
Compactness Measure |
Maximum distance between the letters of an ELS pair |
Number of Trials |
1000 |
Significance Level of test |
1% |
We did find that
four of the sub-camps had ELSs in closer meetings with Auschwitz than expected by chance.
But the test of hypothesis failed to produce statistically significant results.
We conclude that it is not the case that nearly all the sub-camps having ELSs in the Chumash
have at least one of their ELSs in a more compact meeting with the key word Auschwitz than
expected by chance, at least in the Hebrew spellings given in the Encyclopedia of the Holocaust.