🚀 go-pugleaf

William L. Bahn (ba...@pcisys.net) wrote:
: Let's see. How long would it take a million monkeys typing 100 characters a
: second each to eventually come up with the string "Romeo and Juliet"?
: That's only sixteen characters since I'm not requiring there to be a space
: in front and the space in back. Let's assume that there are 60 characters
: (each equally likely to be hit by our monkeys) in the set to allow for
: upper and lower case, the space key and a sparse set of punctuation marks -
: no numbers even. How long for these million monkeys to pull off that feat
: randomly - about once every ten trillion years. Of course that goes up to
: once every 32,000 trillion years if I require a space in front and a space
: in back. Get the idea.

There's a web page (anyone know the url?) attempting something like
this.  There's a computer coming up with random strings of letters and
numbers, with the goal of quoting Shakespeare (lower-case only).  A
record is kept of the closest strings (best last I knew was 30%
correct--this might take a while).

[snip]

			-HiLary, #193, SP1