monkeys on typewriters

Ed LaBonte · science forum beginner Joined: 09 Jun 2005 Posts: 1

You've all heard of Sir Arthur Eddington's suggestion: "If an army of
monkeys was strumming on typewriters they might write all the books in the
British Museum." When paraphrased this is usually reduced to Hamlet alone.
If it is true that Hamlet can be found in any infinite sequence of random
letters, then it exists somewhere (in ASCII) within the number Pi or the
square root of 2. All we have to do is go out and find it.

Rusty · science forum addict Joined: 30 Apr 2005 Posts: 70

"Ed LaBonte" <edNO@SPAMlabonte.com> wrote in message
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Jim Jim · science forum beginner Joined: 15 Jul 2005 Posts: 3

First of all, if it were to contain these works, finding them would be much
much harder than writing them from scratch.

Is it actually possible though? It's impossible to answer that question, I
think. I'm pretty certain it isn't known, at least. Consider the number (in
decimal):
0.101101110111101111101111110...
(0 point 1, 0, 2 1's, 0, 3 1's, 0, 4 1's, 0...)

This certainly isn't rational (is it transendental? I don't know) and
clearly doesn't contain Hamlet (any more than zero does), so it's not
definite that pi or root 2 does either.

"Ed LaBonte" <edNO@SPAMlabonte.com> wrote in message
news:pan.2005.06.09.15.06.51.32933@SPAMlabonte.com...

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