Out of Pod Experience

The odds of generating anything meaningful are truly staggering. Let's say you want to randomly produce a particular 140-character code to post to Twitter (yes these really exist). That's 1,120 random bits in a specific order. That means you have 2^1,120 possible outcomes, only one of which is your desired result. To put the spectrum of possibilities in better perspective, that's a 338-digit number that is well on its way to equaling the estimated number of atoms in the known universe.

If you did 10,000 random bits per second for 14 billion years, you'd have generated 3,942,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations...assuming your randomizer never repeated a set. That's less than 2^64. It will take you another 25-30 billion years to reach 2^65.

Infinite? Yeah, you're going to need infinity to get the results you're looking for.

(if I ****ed up the math in this post, too bad. It's been a while.)

You know the sad truth about this? Getting a random number generator to produce EVE would still be faster than CCP's approach to game balance.

Well, Thx Alexis at least, for contributing to the thread with some sense of intellectual integrity.

Infinite monkeys typing on infinite keyboards does not mean they will find infinite solutions to infinite problems. It means they will make an infinite banana requests.

OK - you say 'forever' - you mean infinity, as you spout its existance in every sentence.

YES - given infiinity, everything is possible, as a bonus itr would also create the BEST ever MMO ever. Now, isnt that nice - unless your a pathetic troll.

You have no time constraints - then you will achieve the seemingly impossible.

GUARENTEED

(EDIT) also have to say - you fail on your grasp of infinity.

Simpler example: the set of positive even integers is infinite. Will you ever see a negative or odd or fractional number? Nope. So infinite doesn't mean all possibilities are possible.

All in all it is just a silly idea since there can be no infinite monkeys. The universe, as far as we know, is limited in mass and usable time left.

And the idea to use monkeys and typewriters is just the same as having a computer generate random stuff as well.

Of course, sooner or later it will hit and match the EVE code or whatever. But what does that tell us? Nothing really, only that infinite time with random stuff will sooner or alter match a current structure.

lahluhq;rihjw;kldjaoshjn'a;HF;OAHFNSDBFHJASB,BASD,.JHA;hkBJ,HAB,JDFBHAJ,DBADJ,ABD.,NR;OIEWQHJJASNDKJolwup98rup23hjlwihfdqilwhnrflwy8fcnm;oweyrwiln.AHSN.,AH;WOIJRNKJ.WHG;DOIAJNJDKGHASLIOHNEJHGL,IAUHKSBJSDAGHJKSDBLUIFHEWURO;IHNFLJKSAGHBFJSC,.NXZ.CJASN.FIHIOURHWELIUHYF;OEWYHUIUASHF;LUISAHNFHJSDBFJ,ASHGFJBSDHGokeup85u0w5u8ijlisfnwjkeyp9uj.kjwsdyf89oijlk;ewfjo'we8u743o;ijkn;soufoisj.asjfklhsdj.reoi;tuwpojr'q9;ifjklksdj;foisdjf.;iaojkr8';[4wiokn;sdiofj




The theory that gives us the idea of "parrallel universes" relys on the principle that complex patterns will enevitably repeat if you have 1. an unlimited amount of time and 2. a finite amount of variables. I however disagree. There is no reason to think that the above would inevitably become Hamlet given enough time and space, it is just as likely that it would remain a string of jumble for all eternity.


Complex order should not be considered the enevitable outcome of super-randomness.

I rate this post at 10 monkeys, 20 minutes.

Actually, for the first section, I think you are either interpreting evolutionary theory (and possibly chaos theory) wrong, or you are repeating something you heard from somebody who misunderstood it. You do get it somewhat right in the end of the second part though.
Also, I don't get why you have to bring chaos theory into the mix anyway. It's not like it's all that relevant in this particular context. And anyway, chaos theory is basically just a fancy way of saying "very complex systems tend to sometimes yield radically different results depending on even tiny variations in initial conditions" (and chaos theory heavily deals with studies of the "result clouds" based on possible initial conditions).

Like somebody else already pointed out, the chance to randomly spit out a specific full-length twitter post by using random valid characters would take so much longer than the age of the universe - although, you probably want to limit yourself to just lower case letters and a few punctuation signs, so that goes down to 700 bits, or a number with "only" 210 digits, and you might want to use a huge array of computers (let's say google's 1++ mil computer network) spitting out hundreds of millions of results per second each, but that's still only an additional 10 digits down, not much of a dent there.

So let's put it this way - evolution does NOT work by completely random arrangements. If it DID work that way, the chance ANY life would exist anywhere in the universe would be pretty darn low, and the chance of something as complex as humans ever evolving would be closer to zero than anything you can even imagine.
Evolution works by SMALL random INCREMENTAL changes which generally trend towards increasing the "fitness" of something (i.e. chance of that thing resulting in the generation and/or maintenance of more of -more or less- the same thing). The "thing" doesn't even really need to be "alive" per se (not necessarily anyway) to have (at least some of) those criteria apply.

Get the same monkeys on the typewriters - you know what, scratch that, get a SINGLE monkey on a SINGLE typewriter - and have a human observer around to act as a "force of (not so natural) selection". The monkey gets to RANDOMLY pick a few letters and a few spots to put them in, generating a few variations of an initially random string ; the human will then decide whichever one of the results "looks more like" a specific tweet (or any tweet), then repeat the whole process with the starting point being the chosen "most like a tweet" string.
And guess what - instead of taking many times the age of the universe to get a decent result, it will probably take just days, or even just hours.
Granted, that's not the best example for evolution (it's artificial, not natural selection - but in the end, it's ANY selection that matters, not exactly what the nature of the selection might be), but it's an example built upon the initial one, making it make more sense.

You would not be able to realistically get even a short joke from an army of monkeys randomly typing on typewriters, let alone the complete works of Shakespeare, just like you will never be able to realistically get even something resembling pong by randomly stringing bits together.
But you WILL be able to get even a complete short story within a lifetime by applying some form of artificial selection, and you MIGHT get a crude video game -like code eventually if you used some clever selection techniques (like, say, having a "genome" that encoded valid and growing programming text and fed it to a compiler then you manually select something that looks like it gives some result and so on).

TL;DR ?

Evolution is not total randomness - actually, almost the exact opposite of it, basically : it's the constant REMOVAL of huge amounts of randomness due to incremental adaptations to current and ever-shifting conditions.
Or something to that extent.