Algorithm developed by Israeli scholars identifies Bible's authors
chicagotribune.comThe article's actual title is clearer and not as likely to be flamebait: "Algorithm developed by Israeli scholars sheds light on the Bible's authorship".
The point of the algorithm is not to figure out if Moses or whoever wrote the bible. The point is to track down strands of a multi-author book:
The new software analyzes style and word choices to distinguish parts of a single text written by different authors, and when applied to the Bible its algorithm teased out distinct writerly voices in the holy book.
The program, part of a sub-field of artificial intelligence studies known as authorship attribution, has a range of potential applications — from helping law enforcement to developing new computer programs for writers. But the Bible provided a tempting test case for the algorithm's creators.
I studied this sort of thing a little from the Humanities side in graduate school, and it can be fascinating. But a lot of room is still left for interpretation and other factors. One example: Caesar's war diaries in Gaul show significant shifts in vocabulary, word order, sentence structure and narrative style between the early and later books. In that case though, multiple authorship is much less likely than one author changing over time. This sort of thing would probably make it harder to solve the Shakespeare problem using this software (which someone mentions as a use case in the article).
Also, if I recall correctly from my humanities days, similar approaches have "proven" that different people wrote Paradise Lost and Paradise Found (John Milton wrote both and there is no serious argument to the contrary).
Funny - since I almost cited the article that (I think) you have in mind. The article I remember wasn't an actual proof though: it was a reductio ad absurdum, used in a review of a book about Homer that used statistical methods. The reductio was, in a nutshell, to show that by the same argument as the one in the book on Homer, the reviewer could prove that Milton didn't write Paradise Lost.
In any case, here's a JSTOR reference to the article I'm thinking of: http://www.jstor.org/stable/641985. (I can provide a pdf copy if anyone wants it. Check my profile for email.) I wonder if this is the one you're remembering.
Exactly what I'm thinking of. If you assume two different people wrote the Iliad and the Odyssey, the same logic shows the Paradise discrepancy.
Damn, that Latin degree pays for itself more and more.
A follow-up on the actual research here: