In which I type another sentence in plain English that has never been typed before (plus thoughts on infinity)

[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.

[knarf]

thine own doth befuddle amidst us

[SamAdams76]

I'm thinking the monkeys would type in the e.e. cummings style.

That is, they would never learn how to work the shift key.

[DannyTN]

To throw a monkey wrench into the works...

Somebody actually tried an experiment with monkeys and typewriters.

It turns out that the monkey’s do not type randomly. They tend to hit the same key over and over again.

Also the dog loves the girl. He’s not howling in anger, dogs growl in anger. He’s howling in fear and confusion because he doesn’t understand the motivations of a little girl that he loves and why she would treat him so.

[DoodleBob]

Per this website since there are 169,541 characters in Hamlet and 36 keys needed to make this work on a typewriter, the probability is 36¹⁶⁹⁵⁴¹.

[DannyTN]

The text of hamlet contains approximately 130,000 letters.

There are 96 characters on a typewriter (varies by model).

However assume you had a typewriter that was limited to 26 characters of the alphabet x 2 for upper and lower case plus comma, period, quote, exclamation mark, and question mark. That would be 52+5 = 57 characters.

Unlike the Deck of cards example, you don’t lose a character each time you type it. In the card deck example, each time a card is dealt there is one less card, thus leading to a formula that looks like 52x51x50.. or 52!

The typewriter formula would be 57^130,000. And that’s only if the monkeys truly type randomly. If they don’t, and experiments show they won’t, then odds will be much higher.

Only way to get the odds down is super intelligent monkeys. And we know that leads to no good.

[Big Red Badger]

Wait,
What?

[Louis Foxwell]

Jesus mused.

[gundog]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0-Lvv1f5Qu4

[Clutch Martin]

“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.””

Yeah, but just think of the boom in typewriter production, sales, marketing, repairs... not to mention jobs! Whole countries would be engaged!

[eabinga]

Found it in the Library of Babel

https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?bwsvjaaza_f_k127

But its not fair, it contains everything that can be written.

[Sicon]

George Carlin (R.I.P.) used to do a bit about sentences no one ever said... I can’t repeat it here, but if you know Carlin, you know why, and you know it was hilarious.

[dfwgator]

I took care of that, heh heh!

[dfwgator]

#7

[GJones2]

I agree that a million or a “hundred QUINTILLION” years probably wouldn’t produce the play. It seems to me, though, that once you assume that the letters will be randomly combined and assume an infinite amount of time, you have to conclude that eventually Shakespeare’s play will be produced. It doesn’t matter how hard it is to find strings of 20 or so common words on the internet.

I post on language forums, and often a good test for whether a three or four word combination is idiomatic in a language is simply to do a net search for it (and if there are only a few results, make sure the results aren’t from non-native speakers). You rightly point out, though, that if the words in the phrase are unusual or the string of words longer than just a few, it’s unlikely to be found and can’t be checked that way.

According to Google, your sentence just appears here, and “The girl grabbed onto the back” just occurs at one other site. Google numbers for search results vary for several reasons and aren’t reliable, but there are 7,560 for “The girl grabbed onto”, and 319,000 for “The girl grabbed”. That’s with the internet being a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms. Imagine a million internet monkeys typing away for millions of years — no, for an infinity of years. Then, I suspect, they’d have something.

[GJones2]

I suspect the monkeys would get tired of typing at random, though, and try to write something themselves. The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges has a story about a fellow who admired Cervantes and the book Don Quixote so much that he wanted to write it himself. Of course, even though it would have been difficult, he could have memorized the rather lengthy novel, and then written it from memory. That's not what he wanted, though. He wanted to create it himself.

So he set about making himself like Cervantes, with the aim of having the work arise naturally, as a product of his own nature. Maybe the monkeys will try something like that. :-)

[Reynoldo]

And there are only about 10⁸⁰ atoms in the observable universe.

[The Duke]

Often, when checking out at the grocery store, I find myself marveling at the thought that the combination of items I have purchases is almost certainly unique throughout the universe.

[GJones2]

>> “And there are only about 10[superscript 80] atoms in the observable universe.” <<

I’ve observed them, but got tired and quit when I started to count them.

[clearcarbon]

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

My quote: “Barack Insane Obama created 57 (Islamic) states in the Union where only 50 (Judeo-Christian ones) existed before and hopes to add 2 more with this present Obama-driven Democrat controlled Marxist/black racism Congress”.