Monkeys on Type-writers

Anecdote on Random Chance theory:

Once someone proposed that if you had a milion monkeys all randomly pushing buttons on their own typewriters, then eventually over time they would 'by chance' create the entire works of William Shakespeare - just purely because of the amount of variables.

Carl Jung, the famous physcologist and philospher had another theory that there was no such thing as chance and that everything happened for a reason, that there was some super intelligence behind seemingly random events.

A test was made where computer generated monkeys randomly printed letters over a large period of time using an internal RNG (Random Number Generator), and then people checked the text to see if anything legible came out. The first so many pages were all junk, nothing like a sentence, not even a word. Then the first word came out, you guessed it,

it was 'JUNG'.

After so many more days of junk being pured out with the occasional word, not even one legible sentence had been made, and the test was finally abandoned.

Theoretically it's impossible to fully disprove the monkey theory because wherever you include infinity in an equation it will never be fully testable. However, for the followers of Jung's theory the question had been answered.


From the writings of Alan Vaughan

thanks for the anecdote - the jung thing doesn't surprise me - i find life to be anything but random - and Yung was a very switched on guy - i love his synchronicity stuff. I believe there is no such thing as luck or chance or coincidence, that every event has significance.

:)

Oh... this is one of my favourite topics...

I wrote a small Treatise on Wikipedia inspired by the Monkey typewriters...

I called it 'Infinity Generation'....

For a long time, I've thought about Infinity Generation - that is, the generation of every possible permutation in a given man-made system. Since such systems are by their nature, finite, they cannot have infinite permutations. However, such systems can appear to humans to be infinite, since humans are unable to perceive or comprehend infinity directly. The level to which any system could appear to humans as infinite would be known as it's granular limit - a term which I coined after thinking about how when we look at a newspaper photo from far enough away, it appears solid, but when we look close enough we see the actual dots (or granules) that form the image. The granular limit would be the limit at which we could be close enough to see and comprehend the image as one entity, but not actually perceive its granules.

Coming back to the point in discussion. I first conceptualized Infinity Generation when thinking about simple images on computers. Take for example a standard Digital Camera image of 640x480 pixels (total = 307,200) pixels. A low-colour format might make use of the GIF standard of 256 colours. To calculate all possible permutations of that Digital Camera image, one takes the number of pixels and raises it to the possible values that each pixel might have (ie: 307,200 ^ 256 = 6.0232391645008958015139896503459e+1404). With today's computing power, we could create a programme which would extrapolate all of those possible permutations of that image within a reasonable timeframe. Since an image of 640x480x256 would have an acceptable granular limit, it could easily be recognisable as any kind of object, person, whatever that exists (or doesn't exist) in our modern world. After generating every image permutation, we would have effectively generated Infinity - we would have within our images, every object, etc. that has, will, does, can't or never will exist.

Taking this one step further, we could apply the Infinity Generation to texts, such as Shakespeare. We would configure the computer programme to a suitable length (ie: The length of a Shakespearean Play), and after a while, we would have every possible permutation of that length of text. Not only would we have the Shakespearean Play, we would have every text that fitted into the configured space. Text would be a better place to start than images, since images are made up of millions (or billions) of colours, and text has only the usual 26 characters (52 if counting uppercase), plus the usual punctuation, white space, etc. If left to run long enough, the Generators would come up with every thing that was, will or is written.

Furthermore, we could expand our Infinity Generation to Films, Music and more.

At the present time, such Infinity Generators would be notoriously hard to implement without some kind of AI, since we would be like Leonardo chipping away the stone, to reveal the statue beneath - we would have to separate the 99.999999999999999 (or whatever) % of chaff, to reveal the wheat - the comprehensible stuff.

What we would do with all this stuff, even I don't know. But look at it this way - amongst all the chaff, the wheat of unimaginable power would lie - a formula for nuclear fusion, a cure for diseases. Plus all the new music, films, texts etc. Truly, from Infinity comes Creativity....

You'd probably love Alan Vaughan's book 'Incredible Coincidence' if you ever saw it Howiemac. What's the chance of you finding it 'coincidently' in the next few days? lol ;-)

Either that, or you'll meet a man who asks you to say 'Gouranga'. :-)



Looks like you were well into this Devolution - What this test showed though was that although it's impossible to disprove the theory. (Who has infinity to wait for it?) that the practical application of it just doesn't work. Without a higher intelligence in control, infinite randomness is exactly that. There is no wheat, only chaff. At least that's my feeling on it anyway...

Originally Posted by DASA

You'd probably love Alan Vaughan's book 'Incredible Coincidence' if you ever saw it Howiemac. What's the chance of you finding it 'coincidently' in the next few days? lol ;-)

by incredible coincidence it is already sitting on my bookshelf - i just checked - someone lent it to me years ago, and i had forgotten all about it, and still havn't read it yet - its is coming out now! :)

Howiemac - Now that's what I call Sync !!

It's weird how sometimes things just perfectly fit into place.

Gouranga !!

Das

Originally Posted by DASA

Howiemac - Now that's what I call Sync !!

It's weird how sometimes things just perfectly fit into place.

synchronicity - always makes me smile and puts a spring in my step - i see it as a sign of being in tune with the flow of life rather than struggling against it - like surfing when you manage to stay on top of that wave for a few magical moments... :)

"synchronicity - always makes me smile and puts a spring in my step - i see it as a sign of being in tune with the flow of life rather than struggling against it - like surfing when you manage to stay on top of that wave for a few magical moments... :) "

As an ex-surfer I'm with totally with you on that one !! Are you sure we havn't met before? lol

Hare Krishna !!

ys, Das