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A Ga-zillion skillion monkeys

by Joe

rock paper satan.jpgI've been reading a lot about probability, game theory, and the like, lately, and it's opened my eyes to some pretty interesting observations.

Take, for instance, the old 'infinate numbers of monkeys with typewriters' thought experiment, for example.

If we are to assume that one could entice a monkey (actually, an infinate number of chimps) to sit at a typewriter forever, (that's gonna require a hell of a lot of bananas) then we could safely say, given the laws of probabilty, that all those little simian beasts will hammer out 'Romeo and Juliet' (o.k….., I could have said something more dramatic like 'Macbeth' but I'll get to that…..) as written by Wm. Skspr.

Then again, while there at it, they'd also type out everything that old Bill the Shake EVER wrote, they'd type out everything that Charles Dickens/Bukowski/Baudelaire ever wrote, they'd type out everything that YOU'VE ever written -yes, even that note you forged to your third grade teacher telling her that you were going to be absent tomorrow because you were planning on being sick- everything that I've ever written and will write here in this shitty blog, and on, and on, and on……….

Given enough time, strange shit starts to show up in seemingly random events -like the so-called 'Feynman point' in the sequence of pi.

However, -and here's the cool part- there is nothing in the laws of probability that says that all of those little fuckers (monkeys) won't sit down at their typewriters and type only the letter 'g' over and over again, ……….forever.

Neat, huh?

We may therefore deduce from our little thought experiment that even though things suck right now, there is a reasonable probability that things are going to stay the same.

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