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tpham Jan 15, 2002

but what if all those minutes were wasted on nothing but gibberish.. what if no real words were ever formed.

deanh77 Jan 16, 2002

you completely missid the point Ty. after 800*38^173944 monkey-minutes, there WILL BE a copy of Hamlet among a very,very large amount of gibberish.

tpham tphamOG 2001

yea but did that formula calculate all possibility that nothing comes out of BUT gibberish..

deanh77 deanh77Founder

ok you kind of have a point, first of all I'm not sure what you mean by gibberish, if you mean, no english words, or no strings of english words that are sentences, etc.

However getting hamlet is even harder than I proposed

Here is why:



if we only had to produce one letter, say "a", instead of all of hamlet, it would not take 26 random hits as I purport my little story. This is because its possible to repeat letters and completely miss the letter "a". The probability that we get it on the first try is 1/26. If we were trying to generate the word "and" then the probability we get that with the first 3 keypresses is (1/26)*(1/26)*(1/26) = 1/(26^3). The more attempts we make the higher the probability that we get the word "and" but it is never guaranteed.


this follows standard equations from probability that I can't remember off-hand.



basically all this means is that it would take a lot longer than previously thought (now maybe hundreds of thousands or millions of universe-lifetimes) for the probability of having Hamlet in our hands was above 75%. And we will never definitely have it. but then again, we could get lucky and get it on the first try, or in the first say, hundred thousand years. but that probability is probably much smaller than 1%.

tpham tphamOG 2001

exactly.. see.. the algorithim before as i read it stated... numbers and stated chances as if it WAS a definite.. but then there's probablity... of missing keys.. etc...

deanh77 deanh77Founder

mmm. not quite. given enough amount of time (which may as well be infinity for our minds, but it is actually finite) they most probably would come up with a copy of Hamlet, because the probability would get soooo close to 1 (but never quite reach it).

thefunkyfresh thefunkyfreshFounder

WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!

I just wanted to refute somebody.

punkprincess punkprincessOG 2001

and you choose DEAN to refute?! dont you know that will lead to embarassment?!

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