Thread: Found a glitch in Maemo 5's terminal...strange characters
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lma is offline lma
2010-11-13 , 10:55
Posts: 2,802 | Thanked: 4,491 times | Joined on Nov 2007
#24
Originally Posted by lunat View Post
it's a funny assumption they make that with infinite tries every possibility neccessarily occurs if they all have the same probability.
Technically it's not an assumption, but a theorem with a specific proof. All it states is that as the number of tries approaches infinity the probability of any particular outcome not occuring approaches zero.

But that's just the theory. In practical terms we are constrained by lack of appropriate hardware, ie a universe of infinite dimensions to contain the proverbial infinite monkeys and typewriters, infinite mass to make them and/or an infinite lifetime to let them bang away on the keys. To quote the article:

However, for physically meaningful numbers of monkeys typing for physically meaningful lengths of time the results are reversed. If there are as many monkeys as there are particles in the observable universe (10^80), and each types 1,000 keystrokes per second for 100 times the life of the universe (10^20 seconds), the probability of the monkeys replicating even a short book is nearly zero.
And of course the also the pesky matter of noticing when interesting outcomes occur - do you know what your /dev/random produced last week?