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 Originally Posted by tmeunknown
This argument also comes in the form of a question,"What are the chances of a tornado moving through a junk yard and putting together an assembled motor car? These are favorite arguments for people who don't believe life has evolved from basic one celled animals to humans. It is an argument against the possibility of such things as mutations and natural selection giving rise to complex organisms. In answer to your question given a FINITE amount of time monkeys and tornado's will not put together anything significant. Given UNLIMITED amount of time the answer is yes. Regards Tut |
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The monkeys would be too busy breeding with each other and the typewriters would break down. OK, I'll stop being quite so pragmatic. It would happen eventually but it would take a very long time. Way longer than it took humans to evolve. To take the evolution of life, it is quite possible that life has evolved through natural selection on other planets. It is not particularly likely that it has evolved in the same way as on earth. The chances of typing a specific book are way lower than that of typing any book. However, whichever way life evolves, it does so partly because of the advantages conferred by beneficial mutations. Unless there is someone to reward the monkeys every time they happen to string letters and spaces together meaningfully they are unlikely to learn to do so in any way that moves forwards towards a piece of work which eventually emerges as Hamlet. In other words, unlike the evolution of life, where increased survival etc leads to a selectivity of the random changes, the typing of the monkeys would rely on pure chance alone. My maths sure isn't good enough to calculate the odds of selecting the correct letters in the correct order but it would be a VERY long shot. However, it would be a finite number, therefore given that the time alocated is infinate it would happen eventually. Of course it is much more likely that the monkeys will evolve superior intellects way before they recreate Hamlet by chance, so then they will find it a doddle. |
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But to the OP question ( bad moderator bad for highjacking thread) If you are looking at it from a math formula, and had millions of years ( and can be go with 10,000 monkeys) or a million perhaps. There is a percentage possibility. But as with any number game, will it ever hit since one possibility is that small odd that one series of event will not happen. But when comparing it to the normal end, where one talks about the creation of the earth, that is just one event, where life would have took thousands of events for the evolution to go. So that would be like perhaps the complete work of Shakesphere and order of his writing |
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I don't understand why this question elicited responses having to do with creation and evolution. It's a simple enough mathematical question, basically boiling down to this: if you type out random letters, how long would it take to get a string of approximately 100,000 characters in a row that would be exactly the text of Hamlet? (I am guessing that the play is 100,000 characters long - if someone has a better estimate please let me know.) Here's a quick, back of the envelope calculation. Assume you have 27 English language charcters to choose from on the typewriter (26 letters plus the space key, asuming we don't care about punctuation or capitalization). In any sequence of 100,000 characters the chance of getting all 20000 correct is 1 in 27^100000, or approximately one in 10 to the 145000 power. So you would have to type out 100,000 x 10^145000 characters in order to have a 50% chance of getting one of those sequences right. That's 10^145005 characters having to be typed. To put this number in perspective - there aren't enough atoms in the entire universe to make the ink to do this work, even if each letter requires only one atom. And the time required if a monkey can type one character per second is thousands of orders of magnitude more than the age of the universe. So is it possible? Yes, from a mathematical point of view, but clearly no from any sort of practical view. |
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Originally Posted by Wondergirl
But to op, no, not as the question stands anyway e.g. you could have an unlimited amount of time but eventually the monkeys will die, then who's going to type out hamlet :( So immortal monkeys stand a better chance :D but theyd break the type writers :( what I'm saying is you need to be more specific to get an answer of yes, and even then its only opinion, No one will ever know Because immortal monkeys DO NOT EXIST :mad: |
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of course they can. Its probability. If you close your eyes and start pushing random letters on your computer, sooner or later the letters H. A. M. L. E. T. will be next to each other. I forgot the exact equation but I think its 21!/26! That's 26 letters in alphabet - 6 letters gets you 20. Now treat everything as objects. Now you have 20 objects(letters) and 1 object(the word "hamlet") so 21 objects and the sample space is 26! So 21!/26!
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dosovm: you're right - it is all about probability. But your math is a bit off. The probability of randomly typing an "H" is one out of 26. The probability of typing an H followed by an A is 1/26 x 1/26. The probability of typing all 6 letters of "HAMLET" in a row is (1/26)^6, or about 1 in 309 million. So if you set your monkey down and he randomly typed letters one per second you could expect that on average it would take him 9.8 years before he's likely to randomly type the word "HAMLET." Ths assumes that the typewriter has no punctuation marks or spaces, and that we don't care about upper case versus lower case. |
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