Month: September 2022

LAUGHINGLY IMPROBABLE. "The combinatorial stringing together of all of the steps between LECA and Macropus rufus (the red kangaroo), Trichomonas vaginalis, or Mozart is, indeed, laughably improbable. Surely, if life’s tape was rewound, none of these would recur." (LECA = Last Eukaryotic Common Ancestor). https://lnkd.in/d6GwkCt View in LinkedIn

HARD CHOICE. "The infinite monkey theorem is a bar in Austin, but it is also a very cool mathematical theorem that deals with very big numbers." https://lnkd.in/dnbrNQ5 View in LinkedIn

"THE INFINITE MONKEY THEOREM states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare. In fact the monkey would almost surely type every possible finite text an infinite number of times." https://lnkd.in/dGAedTt View in LinkedIn

MILLION VIRTUAL MONKEYS. "Just two years ago, Jesse Anderson used Amazon's cloud computing resources to create a virtual monkey army that quickly and randomly assembled works of the Bard. (Anderson has a nice visualization on his website of the way the words emerged in Shakespeare's poem "A Lover's Complaint.")." https://lnkd.in/dmvcR5f View in LinkedIn

ONE MONKEY TYPIST. "The Infinite Monkey Theorem proves that however improbable such an occurrence might be, it is virtually certain to happen if one monkey keeps typing random characters for a very, very, very long time. In order to produce the 3.7 million characters in Shakespeare, in perfect order, for instance, the monkey would have to type for a mere 10 to the power 6 million years. That's 1 followed by six million zeros. The age of the universe is roughly 1 followed by ten zeros." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

PARALLEL TYPING. "Alternatively, a comparably large number of monkeys could all type in parallel. One of them would produce the entire text word for word straight away." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

NEITHER SOLO NOR PARALLEL. "The project that attracted all the attention did neither of these. It was the brainchild of programmer Jesse Anderson, who wanted to test some software for ‘cloud computing', where many individuals use cheap notepads as terminals, and the actual computation is done by vast banks of servers located in a gigantic warehouse somewhere in Kansas or wherever. So he wrote short programs to produce random 9-character sequences, e-mailed to a central repository in the cloud." https://lnkd.in/dYDipGw View in LinkedIn

BIG NUMBERS. "Or to put it another way, to have a one in a trillion chance to type out Hamlet we would need another 10(360,641) Universes full of monkeys." https://lnkd.in/dnbrNQ5 View in LinkedIn

ANDERSON METHOD. "Each sequence is nine characters long and each is checked to see if that string of characters appears anywhere in the works of Shakespeare. If not, it is discarded. If it does match then progress has been made towards re-creating the works of the Bard. To get a sense of the scale of the project, there are about 5.5 trillion different combinations of any nine characters from the English alphabet." https://lnkd.in/dzCpVE8 View in LinkedIn

ANDERSON DATA. "The monkeys ran 180,000,000,000 character groups a day. An average iteration lasted 30 minutes 33 seconds and ran 5,000,000,000 character groups. The monkeys found 1,982,507 distinct character groups and those character groups were found 3,788,175 times for a ratio of 1.8718555. The monkeys ran 7,445,912,000,000 total character groups out of the 5,429,503,678,976 possible combinations for a ratio of 1.3713." https://lnkd.in/djJFZTk View in LinkedIn