The Shrine

First story of:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/05/ ... 3500.shtml

I thought this was hilarious.

We're all familiar with the idea that "an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters will eventually produce all of the great works ever written."

Well, as an "experiment", a few zookeepers put a computer in a monkey cage with six monkeys in it for several weeks, with the intent to save all of their output to a word processor.

The monkeys attacked it with a rock, then spent a few days shitting and pissing on the keyboard. They did later manage to bang out about five single-spaced pages consisting of mostly the letter "S", though I'm rather unclear what this proves.

Thankfully, no one has tried to test Schrodinger's Cat yet, at least as far as I know...

We did an interesting exercise in my thermal physics class. We assumed that 6 billion monkeys were hitting a key once a second since the beginning of the universe, for which we used 13 billion years. What were the chances that any monkey, at any time, produced a string of characters that exactly matched a work of Shakespeare? (I forget how many characters long we assumed a work of Shakespeare to be.)

The answer was, if I remember, around 1 in 10^160,000. That answer is non-zero, but for most practical applications, it can be treated as zero. This is what a thermal physicist means when they say "never." When they say that all of the molecules in a room will never be in one half, with the other half being a vaccuum, they do not mean that is physically impossible. They mean that it is so unlikely that we could wait many times the age of the universe, and it would still be extremely unlikely to occur. The laws of thermodynamics are statistical statements.

There have been some experiments with random text generators on computers (which do not shit on their input devices and so are better tests of the "classic" monkey experiment). Words show up fairly often, and I think they have gotten four or five words in a row out of certain Shakespeare plays.

Given the obvious speed and efficacy of this process, I'll stick with Shakespeare.