in reply to Be a monkey!

Actually with an infinite number of monkeys it should take only as long as it takes one monkey to type that volume of gibberish. That is because in that timeframe, out of all of the monkeys, an infinite number will have accidentally come out with the perfect Shakespeare.

Of course figuring out which monkey(s) did it may take a while. :-)

EDIT
An incidental note. An infinite number of chessplayers playing each other at once are rather less likely to come up with the perfect chess game than an infinite number of monkeys trying to play chess. Why? Because humans will attempt to apply their theories and consistently make certain types of mistakes.

So you see, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. :-)

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RE: RE (tilly) 1: Be a monkey!
by mischief (Hermit) on Aug 31, 2000 at 16:42 UTC
[reply]
      We may need a mathematician or perhaps a physicist to devise a proper module for this purpose. The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite obviously considers the use of subatomic monkeys and monkeys in multiple universes, hence the need for the I-TAG encoding needed to enumerate them all.

      This problem seems to closely resemble the programming necessary for quantum computers. Obviously if you need as many qubits (quantum bits) as there are letters in the longest document you seek to reproduce, you are in trouble since science has yet to produce more than a handful of qubits.

      But if you had the use of the 5 qubit computer IBM built last month, which is basically using five atom-sized monkeys in multiple universes, you could work on the problem five bits at a time (should be just enough to pick a character from the set of capital alphabet letters, the space key, and a few diacritical marks).

      In the words of the inventor of this quantum computer, words which little does he realize will soon be immortalized (!) through Perl and our application of the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite,

      `A quantum computer could eventually be used for practical purposes such as database searches -- for example searching the Web could be sped up a great deal -- but probably not for more mundane tasks such as word processing,'' said Isaac Chuang, the IBM researcher who led the team of scientists from IBM, Stanford University and the University of Calgary.

      This open source effort could possibly be funded by a modest tax of 1/1000 of a penny per monkey provided, including all universes traversed by the protocol of course.

[reply]

      (Two other papers that might be of interest are "The Mathematics of Monkeys and Shakespeare" and "More Monkey Business".)

      Note that the argument against evolution presented in this last document is wrong. The chance that a work shakespeare is generated randomly is indeed almost zero. However it is rather easy to evolve a work of shakespeare, provided there is a way to select the works that look more like shakespear from works that look less then shakespeare.

      Have Fun

[reply]

        I think you've missed the point of the essay - the fact that we are part of a system that is able to evolve is the remarkable thing.

[reply]
        Is it a surprise that the argument is wrong?

        I spent a few years on alt.atheism and friends, and without exception every last argument I saw against evolution showed some basic misunderstanding of biology, general science, math, or a combination of the above.

        I used to have a great essay, A Priori vs A Posteriori (or something like that) on alt.atheism I pointed people at for most of the statistical arguments. I used the copy on dejanews, but they are fubarred at the moment. If anyone can find it I would appreciate it.

        And yes, this is seriously OT for this site. Anyone with an interest in this should go to talk.origins and hash it out there. Or visit their website and learn some of the basics.

        EDIT
        A friend of mine just found it for me. Here is a copy. :-)

        Basically after a lot of math, the point is that the argument by design will only be convincing to people who already have some belief in God...

[reply]

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