Some people apply a lot of data analysis to Ob Rings. I got this as part of a discussion between players via email. The pictures are missing...
The question being: why have a third word at all, when you could just as easily have a phrase of two words with only OB? And four words, well you’d probably begin to run out of space on the inside of a ring…
Or if some had two words, some had three and some more, well, we haven’t seen that either…
An OB ring could have some way of showing rings (without fear of eavesdroppers) that displays enough info for two people who have never met, to know:
- who they work for (ring, first 2 words if checking)
- which subset they work for (colour)
- rank (third word), so a boss of one colour could still order a longer word-three of a different colour about if temporarily necessary
- plus you could promote people if they have conspired for long enough and get a new phrase (ok that one is pure speculation)
I do maths, I spot patterns quite well (and agreed, sometimes where there are none), but this has a significance to it that is well above background ….
Having come across several logic puzzles where you sub in the length of the word before, that’s what led me to it when I noticed the bosses third words were BOTH shorter than their respective employees, to the Same Amount. (by stacking the boss on top)
…that’s only a 25% chance of happening randomly with Any random Word (subbing in L and S for an unknown Long or Short word: LL/SS, LS/LS, SL/SL, SS/LL ), and lower % as we only have words of length 4 and 5 in word-slot three, but that chance of it being random could get a lot lower the next time we spot a ring… added to this is the first two words of each inscription have a wider range of letters:
MacB “8,5,4.”
Saxby.. “11,6,5.”
Bergeron.. “3,8,4”
Finona. . “8,5,5.”
as far as we know, Finona didn’t work for MacB at all (or Saxby for Berg: note ring colour): yes one 8,5 could be coincidence, but the 4,5 / 4,5 is less statistically likely to be random due to the narrower range…
Eg: Consider the magic square below. Note that its rows, columns and diagonals each add up to the magic constant 45. What else about it is interesting?
When each number in the original square is replaced by the number of letters in its name - known as its logorhythm - we get a new square. There are four letters in "five", nine letters in "twenty-two", eight letters in "eighteen" and so on.
Amazingly, this too is magic, with magic constant 21. Even better, its entries are consecutive numbers. Subtracting 2 all around yields the classic lu shi magic square, with constant 15, known to the ancient Chinese