More on "monkey typing sheakspeare"

[Nathelion]

But Stephen King used them so much more! I see books called "The Collected Works of Shakespeare" all the time in stores, but could YOU cram all of Stephen King's books into a single volume? I think not.

On the other hand, all of King's books are the same, so maybe it's sufficient that they come up with one of them🙂?

 

[WildHorse]

ideas are really infinite based on the number of words that are available in English or any language

I think you go wrong right there. That's the wrong "basis." Vocabulary of any culture of people affects what they take notice of, what they become aware of. You know that old saying about how you see snow, but an Eskimo distinguishes maybe 17 types of snow, you feel love, but those Greeks had a lot of different types of love, etc.

So the language, in your example English, is just one little cup that can't hold the infinite ocean of ideas.

I mean, a lot of ideas and emotions are vividly expressed in music, not in a spoken language like English or Tagalog or Swedish. Those are just different little inadequate cups.

Saints of various religions who have high consciousness experiences of spiritual ecstasy and realization, after they "come down" say it's ineffable, incapable of being expressed in spoken words.

 

[WildHorse]

and as for the monkeys thing, it's usually infinite monkeys. So if infinite monkeys pounded infinite typewriters, the say that at least one would exactly reproduce all of Shakespear.

Actually that's wrong because it misses the point about infinity.

Infinite monkeys would produce infinitely many exact reproductions of Kant and Shakespear and Aristotle and Plato and all the term papers YOU've ever written and your to-do list and grocery list. And all in proper sequence. Infinitely many. Gotta remember that INFINITE means infinite, not "at least one."

 

[gsellis]

Originally posted by: scott
and as for the monkeys thing, it's usually infinite monkeys. So if infinite monkeys pounded infinite typewriters, the say that at least one would exactly reproduce all of Shakespear.

Actually that's wrong because it misses the point about infinity.

Infinite monkeys would produce infinitely many exact reproductions of Kant and Shakespear and Aristotle and Plato and all the term papers YOU've ever written and your to-do list and grocery list. And all in proper sequence. Infinitely many. Gotta remember that INFINITE means infinite, not "at least one."

I wonder if the English or Klingon version would be done first? 😉

 

[sao123]

Originally posted by: lyssword
Recently i've been thinking about the meaning of something I saw, the definition of symbols in sociology. It says symbols are a way that humans use to communicate infinite ideas.

However I'm wondering if the ideas are really infinite based on the number of words that are available in English or any language. If you take a set of 995116 x 995116 *edit to the power of,not just times* (basically all words in english) would that not include any possible combination of words to create ideas? That's 990 255 853 456 possible combinations. I'm probably missing some other factors, like math, but that could also be factored in, I believe

(due to the possibility of your "ideas" being nouns, verbs, adjectives, or adverbs...lets call them expressions)

The fact that
1...there are expressions which exist in one language, which do not exist in other languages

and

2...furthermore, there are expressions which may exist, but not yet be be described by any language.

Gives credible evidence to support that independent of language, there are infinite discrete expressions which can be communicated, once mapped to a finite set of symbols.

 

[SunSamurai]

Given an infinite amount of time, one of the monkeys would turn into Shakespeare and write the whole thing out while singing the pledge of allegiance. =D

But really, whats the average amount of time it would take statistically? And what is the actual equation to determine the amount of tries assuming random keys are pressed?

 

[SunSamurai]

Ah, also, how many key presses are we assuming the monkey will get per second? How many keys on the keyboard? If it hits a random one out of 110, I think that would make it take a much longer time than if there were 90 keys.