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New York: Are aliens using traffic signal to cross roads on Red Planet? Fun apart, NASA's Curiosity Mars rover has clicked a picture on the Martian surface that resembles a "traffic signal".
given enough time even a room full of typewriters manned by monkeys could eventually type out Shakespeare's sonnets.
originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: BomSquad
given enough time even a room full of typewriters manned by monkeys could eventually type out Shakespeare's sonnets.
No they couldn't.
Anymore than a Jumbo jet can design build and take itself off the runway
But I'll play long about the traffic light…
What do we suppose the little extra light in the array is for?
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
In this context, "almost surely" is a mathematical term with a precise meaning, and the "monkey" is not an actual monkey, but a metaphor for an abstract device that produces an endless random sequence of letters and symbols. One of the earliest instances of the use of the "monkey metaphor" is that of French mathematician Émile Borel in 1913,[1] but the earliest instance may be even earlier. The relevance of the theorem is questionable—the probability of a universe full of monkeys typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero).