January 22, 2010

that's a really long time

Via clusterflock, via orgtheory.net (links! they’re for clicking!) is this bit from Seth Lloyd’s book Programming the Universe.

The probability of a monkey typing out a phrase with twenty-two characters is one divided by fifty raised to the twenty-second power, or about 10^-38. It would take billion billion monkeys each typing ten characters per second, for each of the roughly billion billion seconds since the universe began, just to have one of them type out “hamlet. act i, scene i.”

Added that to my wishlist. Worth reading?