Posted on 04/21/2021 6:04:56 PM PDT by SamAdams76
It is said that if you sit a million monkeys at a million typewriters for a million years, eventually, one of them will randomly type out William Shakespeare's "Hamlet."
(Let's just assume monkeys can be trained to feed paper into a typewriter and change out the ribbons from time to time.)
After all, there are only 26 letters in the English alphabet so surely after a million years of a million monkeys typing away, one of them will eventually get around to putting together the necessary keystrokes to type out "Hamlet."
I vehemently disagree with that hypothesis. In fact, if you put a hundred trillion monkeys at a hundred trillion typewriters and had them type away for a hundred QUINTILLION years, you would still not produce "Hamlet."
For even though their are only 26 letters in the alphabet, the possible combinations of those letters are nearly infinite. Consider the millions of books in English that have already been published. None of them are even nearly the same in the context of combination of letters.
In fact, I am going to now type out a random simple English sentence that has never been typed before:
The girl grabbed onto the back leg of the black dog and swung it about until it howled in anger.
There you have it, a simple English sentence of just 20 simple words that has never been composed before. Go ahead and try and prove me wrong. Go to your favorite search engine and type that sentence in. You will not find it anywhere. (Eventually the search engines will find this sentence in this Free Republic post but that DOESN'T count!)
Now consider a deck of 52 playing cards. People have been playing cards for hundreds of years. Yet go ahead and shuffle the deck and deal them out. You will have dealed a unique combination of cards that has never yet been dealed out before. That is harder to prove but yet it is.
Mathematically expressed, there are 80,658,175,170,943,878,571,660,636,856,403,766, 975,289,505,440,883,277,324,955,367,923 possible ways to shuffle a deck of 52 cards. (Throw the jokers in and we will have to add many more digits.)
So it is safe to say that nobody has ever dealt out a 52-card deck exactly the same. Especially when you consider that only about a trillion (an infinitesimal fraction of the possible combinations) has ever been dealt out in the history of playing cards.
So go ahead, respond to this post with you own unique English sentence that has never been composed before. It's quite easy to do.
“Ford, there’s an infinite number of monkeys outside. They want to talk to you about the script for Hamlet they worked out.”
Saved for posterity. Well I guess my great-grandkids will see that someday and wonder about what a strange great-grandfather they had.
Bert?
Bert?
A+Bert, is that you?
No Verb
The Post distinct.
I remember the words of the Maharishi Guru ... Words I’ll never forget.
It was “Always...”
No wait...
It was “Never...”
Gravelly gumbo drinkers never goose the duck.
What is Joe Biden’s bragging?
Correct!
I’m a democrat and I support building more prisons to house the ever increasing number of criminals that are ravaging America’s cities.
The word is dealt. This guy needs a monkey typewriter.
I remember him but must have ignored most of his posts
Now Libbylu’s Opus...
Stuff of legend
Unnnnngh
Even if I used “dealt”, it would have been a unique sentence!
I think Nancy Pelosi probably said that.
It’s all in the Library Of Babel.
Look it up.
“Hi, I am a reporter for CNN, and Joe Biden has dementia.”
The Democrat answered honestly he did not find the profitable, but dishonest, maneuver ethical and he refused.
Improbable .
Well the 26 letters on typewriter are not exactly correct. There are 72 letter, upper case and lower case. There also punctuation marks, numbers and other symbols. All told, if I am counting correctly there 94 possible key strokes including the space bar and the shift key.
With that possible combination those monkey could not type any one book of Shakespeare in billions of years. Also keep in mind that the monkeys would have to type the complete work where they made only 1 mistake for each letter in his works or only 2 mistakes, etc.
so for each letter, space, punctuation the monkeys would have one chance in 94 of getting the right one. time that by the total letters, spaces, punctuation, etc. and you have an incredibly large number.
Further you can assume that the 1 million monkeys would type two million letters per second (2 per second for each monkey)
virtually impossible task given the random pecking at the typewriter. and that is not considering the cost of binding the finished product.
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