Everyone has their price ... and I'm cheap.

Thursday, March 17, 2005

That's a lot of Monkeys...

I'm a firm believer in the fact that if you had an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typerwriters, one of them would eventually write Hamlet. Well, if you want to get technical, an infinite number of monkeys, but not all of them, would actually write Hamlet on the very first time. That is, after they have typed the actual number of characters in Hamlet, then decide to stop at that point and groom the monkey next to them.

In fact, an infinite number of them (but not all of them) would also write Macbeth, and Julius Ceasar, and everything else that has ever been written. Oh, and there would be a whole lot of garbage out there as well.

Thats the funny thing about infinity. It's really big. And it contains a lot of subsets of infinity. If you had an infinite number of socks, you would also have an infinite number of pairs of socks (and an infinite number of socks for which the other of the pair has gone missing, or has a big hole in the toe). That's to say, assuming all your socks are hole free, you have infinity dived by two equals infinity number of pairs of socks. Obviously the number of pairs is fewer than the total number of socks (by at least half), but you still have an infinite number of pairs.

That is why you can't do things like say "Infinity - infinity = 0" (because as I just showed, the number of socks minus the number of pairs of socks is a positive number, the result would actually equal be infinite as well) or "Infinity/infinity = 1." This also doesen't work.

Infinity is a pretty funny concept, and just remember if you do want to get an infinite number of monkeys trying to write some popular book, like Hamlet, so you don't have to fork over the $25 at Chapters, remember that you have to leaf through all of the monkey gibberish to find the one that is actually successful.

It's going to suck when you think you finally found it and you get down to the last line and Horatio says: "Ay, good my lorb."

2 Comments:

Blogger Badaunt said...

I have a feeling you will be interested in this:

http://www.100monkeys.org/

:-)

3/19/2005 1:01 a.m.

 
Blogger thisismine2 said...

Thanks for the link. I played with it for a little while. I think I got two and a half words.

The inspiration behind this post was that I have 4 reports two write and I thought it would be easier with some monkey help. So then I got thinking about it.

I thought I had some original ideas, but a quick google (after I posted) showed me that I wasn't as original as I thought. Oh well. I still like it. and thats all that matters.

3/19/2005 1:32 p.m.

 

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