Re: [ARSCLIST] Whacky Packia

[stevenc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "George Brock-Nannestad" <pattac@xxxxxxxx>
> I have wondered about this illustration ever since I read about it in
'One,
> two, infinity' by George Gamow. I am happy that someone did monitor the
> monkeys, but I have always questioned the purpose of it all. Unless the
> monitor knew Shakespeare already he could not determine that it was
actually
> by him. But then he did not need the monkeys to write it. And if he did
not
> know Shakespeare, how would he, determine that it was yet another piece by
> him? Gamow mechanized the whole thing and used a very long wheel printer,
> just counting up slowly. He got the same results as the monkeys, only in a
> different and predictable order.
>
Well, when the old cliche was invented, the typing monkeys
were about the only way to get an input of random characters...
and the point was that, since the odds of a random set of
generated characters matching the set of all the characters
in the complete works of Shakespeare...IN THE SAME ORDER...
while very large, are still finite!

Today, you could do it by programming your computer to
generate random numbers between 32 and 127, converting
those to the ASCII characters and displaying or printing
the results, Since the odds are one chance in 96 that
a given character will be generated, the odds of matching
a set of N characters is 1 in 96^N...and if N = The number
of characters in Shakespeare's works, we are going to have
a fairly large number (even bigger than my gas bill!).

And, if we assume a fast computer could generate a billion
characters per second, you still needn't expect Shakespeare
by, say, the end of 2005!

However, using this approach will save a lot on bananas...

Steven C. Barr
(who may be GOING bananas...?)