Re: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] fun math thing

[Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

Mike Miller wrote:
> On Thu, 1 Jun 2006, Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
>
> > Except that if you do the calculations and make very rough estimates 
> > of how long it will take for the monkey to get even the first 100 
> > letters of any of the plays, you will find that we are dealing with 
> > gadzillions of lifetimes of the universe - even the very particles of 
> > which the monkey are composed are going to fall apart long before any 
> > decent semblence of a work of Shakespeare is going to appear.
>
>
> We'll just have to make more monkeys then!  ;-)


More monkeys that the universe is capable of producing, but ...


> > And replacing monkeys with super fast and reliable computers isn't 
> > going to help - the kinds of times and reliabilities required are 
> > quite simply beyond possibility.  To get Shakespeare in this way is 
> > completely impossible.
>
>
> With infinite time to work with, it is completely impossible that it 
> won't happen (infinitely many times).

Well, now we are back into the realm of the imaginary land of 
mathematics, and in a part of that realm that has nothing to do with 
reality.  But ...

But in this realm I would counter that it is not impossible that it 
won't happen, just that it will happen with probability one.

Stephen

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