Re: Materialism versus a sense of wonder

On Apr 20, 1:52 am, "Bernie Woodham" <birnhamw...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"really real" <reallyr...@xxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:bTpOj.75734$Cj7.39880@xxxxxxxxxxxx



Right. I think it's kind of odd that people will agree that a room full
of monkeys at typewriters could never come up with Shakespeare. But many
of these same people will accept that life is an equally improbable
accident.

Wait a minute. I always thought, if you left the monkeys at their
typewriters long enough, they would come up with the complete works of
Shakespeare. When did people stop believing that?

Well, if nothing else, usenet absolutely disproved it.

Speaking for myself, I've never considered it possible that monkeys could
write Shakespeare. Consider that a typewriter has 40 keys. (It has more,
but we're being gracious to the monkeys.) We'll also excuse the monkeys the
punctuation and overlook uppercase/lowercase mistakes.

The shortest Shakespeare play has 14,369 words. This is "The Comedy of
Errors". Now, looking on line, I read that the average word length is 5
plus the space would be 6. But we'll leave it at 5.

That means the monkeys would have to get 71,845 continuous letters correct.
So this would 1 in 40 to the 71,845th power. This is very small number. You
can't use a normal or scientific calculator to find it. The answer is 0.
It'll never happen.

How about one of the poems, then? Well, even 200 words would bring us 1000
continuous correct letters. 1/40^1000=
8.7098098162172166755761954947789e-1603 A pretty small number. I think
monkeys would become extinct before it ever happened, but we are presuming
they type forever. Still wouldn't happen.

My thoughts about this are nothing at all original. Cicero impressed it on
me:

"it is as unlikely that unguided atoms - even in infinite time - could fall
into the order of the existing world as that the letters of the alphabet
should spontaneously form the Annales of Ennius."

I guess Wikipedia has a discussion of this where they call it the "Ifinite
Monkey Theorem".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

I totally agree with you, Bernie. In fact, I've presented similar
arguments to friends many times, but they always shake their heads
because they assume if I don't believe in a random-universe I must be
a religious nutter. It's fine that people are different. What's
interesting is noting which side is "superstitious" and irrational...
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: "Hundredth Monkey" theorist dies...
    ... the chance of getting the ... Shakespeare claim never made held water. ... The original hypothesis involved placing the monkeys ... at typewriters, not computers. ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: Materialism versus a sense of wonder
    ... of monkeys at typewriters could never come up with Shakespeare. ... That means the monkeys would have to get 71,845 continuous letters correct. ...
    (rec.music.dylan)
  • Re: "Hundredth Monkey" theorist dies...
    ... the odds against monkeys typing Shakespeare by chance are ... The original hypothesis involved placing the monkeys at typewriters, ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)
  • Re: orygun
    ... There is an old saying that if a million monkeys ... typed on a million keyboards for a million years, ... eventually all the works of Shakespeare would be produced. ...
    (rec.sport.football.college)
  • Re: "Hundredth Monkey" theorist dies...
    ... the odds against monkeys typing Shakespeare by chance are ... typewriters, not computers. ...
    (alt.gathering.rainbow)