That is indeed how probability works, the probability of writing Hamlet by just randomly hitting keys on a keyboard are greater than 0, not much greater, but greater still
So for context, this is referencing a thought experiment where if you have an infinite number of monkeys typing words randomly, one of them is going to type out the entirety of hamlet. What does this mean? No idea. Probably something really profound.
I don't know all the punctuation that appears in the script of Hamlet, so if we just assume full stops, commas, question marks, and exclamation marks, and assume we don't care about the text to be case sensitive, and don't require line breaks, a keyboard with the required 31 keys needed to type the script (26 letters, 4 punctuation, and a space bar) could achieve the script of Hamlet in a 1/31H where H stands for the required keystrokes to type out Hamlet
This number is so incredibly small that calling it astronomically small does it injustice, but it is greater than 0
An infinite amount of monkeys on typewriters will produce an infinite amount of literary masterpieces, and an infinitely larger amount of pure slop, also an infinite amount of the human genome
now imagine a giant library of books with all those variations and your task is to find the book without any mistakes that correctly details your life.
that's the plot of this awesome novella "A Short Stay in Hell"
makes you truly appreciate the concept of these sorts of numbers
Damn that vaguely reminds me of some story but cant remembet what. It was like a massive infinite library. Some of the books were gibberish because every possible combination existed. Some books told the future. And there were like different sects of people living there. Some worshipped the books. Some wanted to destroy them. I'm probably misremembering but now I want to go find it and give a reread. Whatever it was. Unless I made it up accidentally. 😅
Im dumb. 😅 I should have just read the page. It isnt that story in particular, but that one is heavily based on the one I was thinking of which was Library of Babel. The name "Short stay in hell" didn't ring a bell so didnt click the link at the time. I'm definitely gonna have to read this one now.
when you account for capitalization (and that some of that punctuation also requires a coordinated shift key) the odds become far worse than that. Also just mechanically I doubt that a chimp mashing on a typewriter creates patterns that are actually random, and are probably considerably biased against making real words due to the layout of a qwerty keyboard
I am going to be overly generous and assume the keyboard only has the required keys needed to write what needed, but on an actual keyboard the probability is even significantly lower indeed
And you are also right that an actual monkey or ape would be less random than presented
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u/Specific-Antelope-72 25d ago
Also this one, which my reddit app didn't send for some reason.