That nice fellow John back then in Patmos had some interesting times in that cave. He made a remark about the Antichrist's name being a number, that is 666 ([c¢x¢V¢] in the original text), and that is derived from the arithmetical values of the letters.

So, who is this Satan guy?

Well, in ancient Greece, letters had numerical values, alpha to theta ([A] to [Q]) were 1 to 9 (with an extra letter [V], known as 'stigma', inserted for 6), iota to pi ([I] to [P]) were 10 to 80 (plus an extra for 90), rho 100 etc. That means that any name with a letter after chi (X) was not doomed (?) to be the Antichrist (N.B. not the Antechrist).

Anyway; this is the computer age.
The end is nigh.
Letters have numerical values all over the world.

Let's talk ASCII.

Take the name "BILL GATES" as a random example. Take an ASCII table, add the letter numerical values: 66+74+... The result is 663 (you can safely ignore the space). Improvise a little, this very person is William Gates the 3rd, so add the number 3 to 663, and, wow, 666.

You can try the same in your own codepages (I am afraid Unicode encoding would allow only very short names though).

Share your findings!