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The Perfect Peshitta Text
#15
Shlama Akhi,

You have answered nothing,Otto, but thank you for making that your last response on this topic.

As to monkeys pounding on typewriters, you seem to have missed the statistical significance of even that scenario. The probabilities of one of billions of monkeys reproducing Shakespeare's work pounding on typewriters would be infinitesmal.

The following article is Associated Press, dated April 2003:
Quote:Give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite number of typewriters, the theory goes, and they will eventually produce prose the likes of Shakespeare.

Give six monkeys one computer for a month, and they will make a mess.

Researchers at Plymouth University in England reported this week that primates left alone with a computer attacked the machine and failed to produce a single word.

"They pressed a lot of S's," researcher Mike Phillips said Friday. "Obviously, English isn't their first language."

A group of faculty and students in the university's media program left a computer in the monkey enclosure at Paignton Zoo in southwest England, home to six Sulawesi crested macaques. Then, they waited.

At first, said Phillips, "the lead male got a stone and started bashing the hell out of it.

"Another thing they were interested in was in defecating and urinating all over the keyboard," added Phillips, who runs the university's Institute of Digital Arts and Technologies.

Eventually, monkeys Elmo, Gum, Heather, Holly, Mistletoe and Rowan produced five pages of text, composed primarily of the letter S. Later, the letters A, J, L and M crept in.

Phillips said the project, funded by England's Arts Council rather than by scientific bodies, was intended more as performance art than scientific experiment.

The notion that monkeys typing at random will eventually produce literature is often attributed to Thomas Huxley, a 19th-century scientist who supported Charles Darwin's theories of evolution. Mathematicians have also used it to illustrate concepts of chance.

The Plymouth experiment was part of the Vivaria Project, which plans to install computers in zoos across Europe to study differences between animal and artificial life.


I also found the following blog on this subject of the monkey experiment:

Quote:???I don???t know who it was first pointed out that, given enough time, a monkey bashing away at random on a typewriter could produce all the works of Shakespeare.??? - Richard Dawkins in The Blind Watchmaker

I first heard this from my high school mathematics teacher, who was a very smart and personable guy. It sounds so plausible too, doesn't it. Of course the idea of monkeys "bashing away" on typewriters is supposed to somehow prove that random events can produce truly improbable results. The problems with even this theoretical example have hardly been addressed. At least I have never read or heard anyone challenge them, ever, anywhere.

The problems with monkeys typing Shakespeare on typewriters are:

1. The typewriter is a very sophisticated and complex machine. I could never build one alone if I had a lifetime.
So the example of orderliness coming from a disorderly monkey in Dawkins' example starts out with a man-made machine, which is terribly artificial and contrived.

2. Nobody, not even a proficient typist such as I am, could type any "works" without paper being properly inserted into the typewriter. What is the probability of the monkey placing typewriter paper correctly in the typewriter once?

3. Having successfully inserted one piece of paper in the typewriter in no way assures that after that page has been thoroughly ruined, another fresh page will be inserted by any monkey, if the pages have not been soiled or destroyed.
Nor can the countless iterations of typing proceed unless a fresh page is inserted every time the last one is ruined.

4. Given these huge, but always overlooked, constraints, why would any healthy monkey continue hitting typewriter keys, day after day?

5. Provided that one stipulates all the previous conditions, artificial and unlikely in the extreme as they may be, the equipment still has to remain workable and clean, rather than thrown about the cage, bent, broken, or defecated on.

6. Notwithstanding all of the foregoing, William Shakespeare wrote with quill and ink on paper, not with a typewriter. If the monkey or monkeys are to duplicate Shakespeare's words (let us not ask them to duplicate his handwriting style as well), should they not write them out?

7. Dawkins further simplifies the task of a monkey typing Shakespeare by artificially constraining the typewriter to only 26 characters. No such typewriter exists, of course.

8. My keyboard has about 60 characters. Considering case sensitivity, as Shakespeare certainly did, that brings the total to say 120 characters, not 26.

9. While I do not know how many works Shakespeare produced, it is sufficient to examine only a 100 character string, the probability of typing out which would be first dependent on insertion of paper, and all the other critical factors listed above, and then we would have 1/120 x 1/120 x 1/120... 100 times.

This works out to one chance in 100 to the 120th power, and that's for one long line, not a sonnet, not a play, and certainly not all of Shakespeare's works.

Since Dawkins has stated that one chance in 10 to the 40th power is impossible, any suggestion of a monkey eventually typing "all the works of Shakespeare" is the antithesis of "clear thinking."

There are many more such examples of Dawkins' lack of "clear thinking" to be examined.ReasoningChristian
Newbie

The key phrase in the theory of Gamow is "given enough time". By all calculations of the statistical odds of the above scenario, there just is not "enough time" to get anywhere near to one of Shakespeare's works by the proposed method.


Read the following blog very carefully:

Quote:I like big numbers. I like really big numbers! When I was in great school I read a book by George Gamow called 1-2-3-Infinity! In it he offered a variation on the "3 Monkeys Problem." (If three monkeys pound away at three keyboards, how long will it take them to reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare?) Gamow quantified things neatly by pointing out that the standard printed line (then) was sixty-five spaces, and there were fifty standard characters including letters, numerals, punctuation marks and the blank space on a (then) standard print drum. Fifty to the sixty-fifth power is roughly 10^110, so based upon 1948 figures if you had one printing press for each of whatever used to be the smallest subatomic particle, each one printing at the rate of an atomic vibration (I think the number he gave for that was 10^-16 seconds) with no duplication, assuming they started five billion years ago (not only was I a lot younger back then, so was the universe) the job would be .033% complete. (I think this must be the printer Nack and Paul are using for their book. ;-))
-Jake Jaqobs

Gamow's argument is used to explain the origin of life without a Creator, as I recall. Pure chance could have produced all living things on the planet, according to the theory. I think that is laughable, and I think such an explanation of the Bible codes phenomenon is just as laughable. <!-- s:biggrin: --><img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/biggrin.gif" alt=":biggrin:" title="Big Grin" /><!-- s:biggrin: -->

Dave
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Messages In This Thread
The Perfect Peshitta Text - by ograabe - 06-07-2008, 07:51 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-09-2008, 06:38 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by ograabe - 06-10-2008, 06:49 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-10-2008, 08:55 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by Stephen Silver - 06-16-2008, 10:57 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by *Albion* - 06-17-2008, 01:11 AM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-17-2008, 04:59 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by ograabe - 06-25-2008, 01:26 AM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-25-2008, 02:54 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by ograabe - 06-27-2008, 01:07 AM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-27-2008, 04:02 AM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by Stephen Silver - 06-27-2008, 05:49 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by ograabe - 06-28-2008, 01:36 PM
Re: The Perfect Peshitta Text - by gbausc - 06-28-2008, 05:36 PM

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