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.

[MadMax, the Grinning Reaper]

#19. Re the Rev Al Sharpton quote. The author was talking about “monkeys” but you are close enough to the species (”Sharpie Conartitus Hatemongerous”)

[mad_as_he$$]

How long before the type this:

“Let’s kill all the lawyers”

[dirtymac]

Probably correct so they could not type Hamlet or any other book.

[dirtymac]

does the 36 keys mentioned take into account spaces?

Just asking because the really astronomical number you provided needs to be a little bit bigger. :)

[dirtymac]

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

That’s when we got the Democratic Party.

[dirtymac]

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

And the Democrats would f*** it up somehow.

[dirtymac]

Please keep in mind that this whole monkeys typing Shakespeare was used as an example to justify evolution. Lightening striking a tide pool (hot dilute chemicals) you would eventually get life started. Then entered the monkeys with typewriters. So if you could get Shakespeare you can get life started.

my memory fades with time but if you took the number of DNA strands and the number of DNA combination the number of also quite large.

I believe we have disproved the monkeys with typewriters as an impossibility. And like the random lightening strikes is also an impossibility.

[Boiler Plate]

Yeah that’s about as far as you can go with this.

[GJones2]

>> “Please keep in mind that this whole monkeys typing Shakespeare was used as an example to justify evolution....I believe we have disproved the monkeys with typewriters as an impossibility. <<

Random typing by monkeys doesn’t take into account evolutionary selection on the basis of fitness for survival, though — natural selection. The monkeys wouldn’t be starting from scratch each time one started to type. Something more comparable would be a million monkeys typing, then as soon as they produce the first word of the play, they’d continue typing at random until the next word is produced, and so on.

(The analogy still doesn’t hold, though, because natural selection doesn’t have a goal such as producing a particular play.)

[GJones2]

When I mentioned Borges above, I didn't realize he had a connection to the monkeys analogy itself. I merely recalled something related in his story about the admirer of Cervantes trying to write Don Quixote. I see from the Wikipedia article "Infinite monkey theorem", though, that the "Library of Babel" story that others have mentioned in this thread is related in the sense that it contains all the random combinations. I didn't wade through the whole article because I don't think the analogy with evolution holds.

[Hot Tabasco]

that has never been typed before:

You're wrong, see my tag line........

[SamAdams76]

Your tagline was obviously an inspiration to me.