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August 17, 2007

Strange But True!

Q. How on Earth did we humans beat the towering odds against us ever evolving in the first place? Asked another way, how long would it take a keyboard-equipped monkey to type a sentence by blind chance alone?

A. In a new take on the old “infinite monkeys” routine, Clifford Pickover in “A Beginner's Guide to Immortality” imagines an indefatigable monkey pounding away, with the target sentence as “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.” The phrase contains 56 letters, counting spaces and the period. Assuming a keyboard of 93 potential characters, then the monkey's chance of hitting the first correct character is 1/93, which he must do 56 times in a row: 1/93 to the 56th power. This means the monkey would have to try more than 10100 times, on average, before hitting on the sentence. “If the monkey pressed one key per second, he'd be typing for well over the current age of the universe.”


 
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