orgtheory.net

Randomness is sort of a fun, alternative explanation for lots of things: organizational success (as discussed by Alchian, 1950), and, say, writing.  I’ve been revisiting Seth Lloyd’s short book Programming the Universe and he has a nice writing-related discussion building on an old favorite, the infinite monkey theorem.

So, the question is: how long would it take, via a random process, for monkeys to type up Shakespeare’s play Hamlet.

There are about fifty keys on a standard typewriter keyboard.  Even ignoring capitalization, the chance of a monkey typing “h” is one in fifty.  The probability of typing “ha” is one-fiftieth of one in fifty, or 1 in 2,500.  The probability of typing “ham” is one in fifty time fifty time fifty, or 1 in 125,000.  The probability of a monkey typing out a phrase with twenty-two characters is one divided by fifty raised to the twenty-second power, or about 10^-38.  It would take billion billion monkeys each typing ten characters per second, for each of the roughly billion billion seconds since the universe began, just to have one of them type out “hamlet. act i, scene i.”

Here’s Ricky Gervais and Karl Pilkington trying to work through this.