wrote in message
news:btcpc6$b0q$1{at}darwin.ediacara.org...
> There is a well known idea that if you could put billions of monkeys
> onto billions of typewriters, and keep them typing away, then
> eventually, just by chance, they would produce the complete
> works of Shakespeare.
> Now that has always struck me as a cute idea, but not true, because I
> estimate the probability of turning out several thousand characters in a
> specific order is vanishingly small, and would therefore require more
> monkeys and typewriters than there are atoms in the universe. (I have
> not actually made that calculation, however.)   

When yer right, yer right - this idea doesn't work as proponents might have
guessed.  I recalled a recent experiment to investigate it, and a central
problem was that that there was not an appropriate degree of randomness with
the monkeys - they tended to repetitively hit just a few keys in similarly
ordered patterns, as opposed to depth and breadth of keystrokes and
keystroke combinations needed to turn out anything meaningful.  IIRC, the
monkeys failed to produce "a single word" (which presumabley
meant something
more complex than .)  Regards, Brett.

> Mitchell Timin
>
> -- 
> "Many are stubborn in pursuit of the path they have chosen,
> few in pursuit of the goal." - Friedrich Nietzsche
>
> http://annevolve.sourceforge.net is what I'm into nowadays.
> Humans may write to me at this address: zenguy at shaw dot ca
>
---
þ RIMEGate(tm)/RGXPost V1.14 at BBSWORLD * Info{at}bbsworld.com

---
 * RIMEGate(tm)V10.2áÿ* RelayNet(tm) NNTP Gateway * MoonDog BBS
 * RgateImp.MoonDog.BBS at 1/12/04 3:12:53 PM