I think it was Eric Alterman's weblog which led me to The Fantastic Typing CyberMonkey. (Don't ask me why Alterman got me there...) Anyway, I started wondering about that one poor little eMonkey typing pseudo-randomly, and how, all alone, he'd never even type the word "Hamlet", let alone the entire soliloquy.
What about distributed computing, I wondered? Why bother with research on better drugs, finding aliens or computing multifactorial primes when we can hook up millions of computers worldwide to simulate a simian Shakespeare!
Unfortunately, in my searching for reference material to back up the grant proposal I planned on writing, I came across this site. Way back in 1995, The Famous Brett Watson used good science and good mathematics (and good humor) to show that I was backing a BAD candidate. As he says:
The chances of failure are still essentially 100%, even after 2^34 years. Hmmm. It doesn't look like were are going to get very far with this, but just for the heck of it, let's see if we are any better off with a lot of monkeys. Let's not hold back here -- I hypothesize 17 billion galaxies, each containing 17 billion habitable planets, each planet with 17 billion monkeys each typing away and producing one line per second for 17 billion years. What are the chances of the phrase "TO BE OR NOT TO BE, THAT IS THE QUESTION." not being included in the output?
0.9999999999999465759379507781960794(etc.)
I'd bet money on that. It's about 99.999999999995% sure that they would fail to produce the sentence.
I was devastated. And then I was astounded, because, following on this mathematical critique, The Famous Brett Watson used the same mathematics to come to this conclusion:
In light of this, I find it impossible to believe that "chance" had anything to do with the process that created life. How can I suppose that Shakespeare himself was the result of a random process when it is quite clearly impossible for even a trivial fragment of his work to have arisen by chance? No sir, I see information all around me, and I conclude that it is the product of a far, far greater intelligence... Information is the product of intelligence, not chance.
Talk about being hoisted by one's own petard: he's used a rational, logical, purely scientific process to show that the scientific process cannot reasonably account for the accidental appearance of a 41-letter phrase, let alone the billions of molecules which make up the lexicon of our DNA. "To be or not to be" indeed!
(If you are so inclined, you may want to read his continued speculations on the improbability of a design-less universe here. As for me, I've got a relative I need to talk to...)
