Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 21:55:34 -0500
Subject: Re: M-TH: Marx's monkey writer


Doug Henwood writes:

>Perhaps we could devise a measure - Huxley monkey-units (HMUs) - that would
>stand for the number of years it would take for the proverbial roomful of
>monkeys to type a given text - sort of like the readability indexes
>Microsoft Word helpfully computes. The Grundrisse would probably be several
>billion HMUs. Hamlet, a much shorter text, would probably earn only several
>hundred million HMUs.

Doug,
          How long are you saying it would take for your "proverbial roomful of
monkeys" to type *Hamlet*???   In my copy of Kittredge, *Hamlet* takes up
some 45 pages of two columns each, with about 2000 characters per column,
or about 180,000  characters (1.8 * 10^6).  Now suppose this "roomful"
contains one billion (10^9) monkeys, each capable of producing 10
keystrokes per second.
          Now there are a possible 90 or so keystrokes on a typical
typewriter or computer keyboard.  Thus, the possibility of any keystroke
beginning a random sequence of 180,000 characters  exactly matching my
rescension of *Hamlet* is 1/90 (10^-1.95) to the 180,000th power, or about
10^-350,000.
          Thus an HMU, under these assumptions, would produce 10^10 *
3,2(10^11) (the number of seconds in a year) or 3.2 * 10^21 keystrokes.
Now suppose the lifespan of our universe (supposedly at the moment some
10-20 billion years old) to amount in all to, say, 315.000,000,000 (3.15 *
10^11) years.  In the lifetime of this universe these billion monkeys would
thus produce some 10^33 keystrokes.
          Thus we see that the number of universe-lifetimes it would take
for us to expect a random process to produce *Hamlet* is
1/10^-350,000/10^33 or about 10^10,600.  So forget about a simian
Grundrisse--*Hamlet* will take them long enough.

           Shane




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