"We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true." -- Robert Wilensky, speech at a 1996 conference
... This is a good joke (as far as I can determine, aimed at the quality of writing on the Net. Well, it was many years ago. :) -- but it also holds the key to an important truth I considered a while ago, which tells us about mathematical complexity, as well as the power of creativity... to wit: not only will a million monkeys NOT produce Shakespeare's works, or even just Hamlet, they will not only produce one straight sentence.
This can be proven, at least subjectively, by a simple Google search. Type in a simple sentence which is not a common expression, put it in quotes and Google it. Odds are it will not be found in all the 5 Billion pages on the web.
Examples:
"I went to my sister's and got drunk."
"Blue is a bad color for airplanes."
"Autumn is nice for Caucasians."
"I can see empty sky from my window."
... Google goes 'did not match any documents' to all of them.
Think about this. Despite the fact that the "million monkeys" are not hammering at the keyboard at random, but in fact writing in English most of them, they won't even produce a random sentence. And then consider the fact that each time you add a single letter, this gets twenty-six times less likely! It then becomes clear that not even a trillion trillion trillion monkeys hammering away for all the age of the universe would produce "Hamlet". (And if they did, how anybody know?)
The original monkey premise is actually a dig at creativity: "anybody could do what Shakespeare did, heck, a bunch of monkeys could do it if you gave them time enough."
Never has less true words been spoken. Nobody but Shakespeare could write Hamlet. Nobody but van Gogh could make Sunflowers. Nobody but Lennon could write Across the Universe.
An act of creation is divine, literally.
5 comments:
For all I know your philosophy may be sound, but your citation and mathematics leave a lot to be desired: you may like to Google on Emile Borel for his probability theory introduction of this concept in 1909; or Dean Swift for the literary notion in 1782. I calculate the probability of you overturning science, academic rigor, and the mathematical concept of infinity with a little folk wisdom, some unsuported assertions, and a lot of casual blogging, to be infinitesimally small. I do hope that this does not discourage you, or inhibit your flow, which I find stimulating despite my seemingly curmudgeonly response.
If we are talking *infinity*, then anything and everything will happen.
But that is meaningless for a human being.
The original theorem did talk about infinity, and as such it is just mathematics, and is quite true. But I have heard it in more than one variation about "a million monkeys for a million years" or such. And stated thusly, it is quite different, and nonsense.
Apparently despite our best assertions, it appears that indeed somebody other than shakespeare can write shakespeare. Or rather, that they did :|
theories like this have been around for a long time, but they seem to get more convincing each time they're rehashed...
All that said, i totally agree eolake. Cept i'm still convinced that a million rednecks with shotguns can turn streetsigns into Hamlet in Braille.
perhaps the millions monkeys on the web have better taste than to write shakespeare =P in any case, it's exactly because they aren't typing randomly, so they're constrained to write 'common expressions'!
It's an infinite number of monkeys, working at infinite number of typewriters, and was never meant to be seriously considered. The meaning of the saying is obvious. However, to console you, someone else has wasted a lot more time than you, and gone to a lot more trouble, to look like a complete ass:
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/monkeys.htm
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