LONDON, Dec. 28 (UPI) -- British statisticians are baffled by the success of the runaway best-seller "The Da Vinci Code," it was reported Wednesday.
The team, led by Alvai Winkler, reported the model it uses to predict the success of books catching on with the public gave "The Da Vinci Code" only a 36 percent chance of even making the charts, the Guardian reported.
Other surprising finds were the average scores given to all of the hit "Harry Potter" books and the negative scores given to nearly everything ever written by Charles Dickens.
Despite the contradictions, Winkler told the newspaper he still has faith in the scoring system that uses the title to predict a book's success or failure.
Books that followed the group's model to success all had figurative titles instead of literal ones -- the first word was a pronoun, a verb, an adjective or a greeting; and the grammar patterns either were a possessive case with a noun, or an adjective and noun or of the words "The ... of ...," Winkler said.
Among the top rated titles were Agatha Christies' "Sleeping Murder" and Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials."
