2006-10-10 10:14:53 · 35 answers · asked by Anonymous in Arts & Humanities ➔ Philosophy
Hell, a few bored people on Answers do it for nothin'...
2006-10-10 10:22:34 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
"The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" is 44 characters long. Lets say each monkey types 440 characters a minute - thats 396 strings of 44 characters per monkey, per minute.
Including capitals numerals and symbols my keyboard has 94 characters. So the chances of hitting the right character are 1/94. The chances of hitting two correct charaters are 1/94^2 and so on. The chances of hitting all 44 characters right first go are 1/94^44. (the "^" is "to the power of"). This is very, very, close to nil. My algebra gave out at that point and I used Excel - it would take your 1000 monkeys a little over twenty one thousand years to produce that one small sentence.
But how many intelligible sentences of about that length are there? I would say millions up on millions - meaning the chances of your monkeys coming out with SOMETHING intelligible is pretty high. Sure they would produce a lot of unintelligable nonesense, and you (nearly certainly) won't get any specific thing - but there will be plenty of intelligible stuff in there!
Another way of looking at it is 1000 monkey typing for 1000 years at 440 characters a minute will produce over 8,000,000,000,000 strings of 44 characters. With that many strings its pretty unlikely that they will all be uninteligible.
2006-10-10 11:15:03 · answer #2 · answered by anthonypaullloyd 5 · 0⤊ 0⤋
No way! Think man. Why would a troop of even second-rate simians waste their time sitting at typewriters when they could be using keyboards and word processing and get the job done in 100 years or so then get on with the important things like food and sex, or as they might describe it, feasting and fornicating?
One interesting sidelight: bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), though more intelligent than monkeys, could never complete the task. They're just too focused on the sex.
2006-10-10 10:54:19 · answer #3 · answered by Seeker 4 · 1⤊ 0⤋
Unfortunately yes.
Want to know something even more amazing? Every one of the trillion or so cells in your body came from one fertilised egg that contained the information for all this in chomosomes and strands of DNA. Each molecule of DNA is about a billionth of a meter thick and about a meter long when unwound.
Each stand of DNA relies on the sequence (ATGC) being correct as even one unit of the four building blocks would cause problems and is duplicated every six months (the life of cells in your body - except for the nerve cells).
The probability of it coming together correctly, if it was a random process, is 1 in one with six hundred zeros after it (1:1E600).
Whether you believe this came about by evolution or creation, this is still more amazing than all the monkeys and typewriters in the world could achieve, even if they lived longer than thousands of years.
2006-10-10 10:42:54 · answer #4 · answered by Nothing to say? 3 · 1⤊ 0⤋
I don't know about the bollocks, but they'd sure produce an awful lot of monkey shite if you ask me... Don't take my word for it, but I believe that this has actually been attempted as an arts project at a zoo a couple of years ago.
Check out the links and... Enjoy!
best,
f.j.
2006-10-10 10:38:54 · answer #5 · answered by josephlincolnlordstanley 2 · 0⤊ 0⤋
I've thought about this one;
The monkeys would not produce as much bollocks as you may be imagining because they would die before 50 years or more would be up, i hope you are allowing them toilet breaks and meals, if not that would make a lot more mess!
2006-10-10 10:32:07 · answer #6 · answered by Matt B 2 · 1⤊ 0⤋
It would take a lot less time than that, and if were a 1000 politicians and one typewriter, it would take just the morning.
2006-10-17 06:12:51 · answer #7 · answered by manforallseasons 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
Yes. Absolutely true. The odds of these bloody monkeys turning out Shakespeare's Hamlet are absolutely astronomical.
They would also produce a lot of monkey poo and waste paper.
2006-10-10 10:18:33 · answer #8 · answered by Anonymous · 1⤊ 0⤋
they might produce unintelligible bollocks, they might produce the answer to the meaning of life. who knows? (at a guess i'd say a load of bollocks, but i'd sure pity the person who had to read it to find out).
2006-10-16 05:51:14 · answer #9 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋
No. One of my favorite books is written by a monkey, but it only took him 15 years. You'll be surprised what some monkeys are capable of.
2006-10-10 10:39:18 · answer #10 · answered by ananswerer 4 · 0⤊ 0⤋
To the monkeys: yes
To humans: Probability suggests that something inteligible would be produced at some point. But, it would be random.
2006-10-17 08:25:51 · answer #11 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋