Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 22:45:08 -0500
Subject: Re: M-TH: Marx's monkey writer (corrected)


The first version of this post contains one typo and one arithmetical
error. This should replace it.

>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 * 10^5).  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 10^349,967.  So forget about a simian
>Grundrisse--*Hamlet* will take them long enough.
>
>           Shane
>
>
>
>
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