Pounding away on a keyboard
Mr. Burns, giving a tour of his mansion: “This is a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters. Soon, they'll have written the greatest novel known to mankind. (reads one of the typewriters) "It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times"?! you stupid monkey! (monkey screeches) Oh, shut up.”
From a review of the book “Chance - A Guide to Gambling, Love, the Stock Market, & Just About Everything Else”: “Some more tidbits: Yes, according to probability theory, a group of monkeys pounding on typewriters really will, given enough time, produce "Hamlet." Aczel gives you the odds. The trick is that in this case, "long enough" is sometime off beyond the death of the universe.”
2 comments:
If these estimates are based on the presumption of purely random typing, they are far too generous. Experiments to date show that monkeys on typewriters tend to hit a single key repeatedly.
triticale
... when they're not defecating on the keyboard.
Post a Comment