Is there more to it than that?


In a word, yes.

In several words, for many codes issues, there are too many possibilities to count or even estimate.

As an analogy, suppose our claim is that a certain town, Torahville, has an unexplainably large number of chance meetings between people (ELS's) on street corners (places in the text) who have meaningful connections to each other.

Critics of our claim say this is no different than in any city - for example, WarandPeaceburgh.

We film all kinds of amazing coincidental meetings in Torahville, documenting them for the world to observe.

But our critics have their own films of WarandPeaceburgh. They only needed to wait for a few hours and interview enough people, in order to collect a beautiful example.

The difference is that in Torahville, we have beautiful meetings almost every minute of the day; and we have truly extraordinary meetings far more often than can be explained through the natural laws of chance.

But how do we demonstrate this?

We could film every street corner, every minute of the day, and interview all of the people who pass each other. But besides being impractical, we still have the problem of objectively defining who has a "meaningful connection" to whom.

So we have to do two things:

(1) Somehow take a survey of what's going on, in an unbiased manner - say filming every hour on the hour.

(2) Establish strict a-priori rules defining "meaningful connection".

More on this in a moment.

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