Don't know Marcus, perhaps a thousand monkeys could type out Hamlet given enough time. How much time would it take?
First identify the probabilistic resources at our disposal. The one-page, online version of Hamlet has approximately 173,698 characters, including spaces. The alphabet has 26 letters and a space; 27 characters in all (not counting punctuation marks).
The chances of a monkey randomly hitting any particular letter or space on a typewriter is 1/27. The chances of hitting the next letter are 1/27. So far, the chances of hitting just those two letters is 1/27 x 1/27, or 1/27^2. The chances of hitting 173,698 characters is 1/27^173,698.
A "Z" and an "A" consecutively won't do it. If we ignore the words "Act I", the play begins thus:
BERNARDO
Who's there?
FRANCISCO
Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.
It's not just any letters; it must be those specific ones.
Consider:
There are approx. 10^80 fundamental particles in the universe.
Planck time allows a particle to change its state at most 10^45 times per second.
The amount of presumed elapsed time since a presumed Big Bang is 10^25 seconds.
Since any physical event, anywhere in the universe, must have at least 1 fundamental particle to specify it -- to make it uniquely that event -- the total number of possible events since the Big Bang is:
10^80 x 10^45 x 10^25 = 10^150
(Add the exponents, for those gentle humanists).
The adds of specifying one unique event in the total number of possible events since the Big Bang is therefore 1/10^150. If you claim to have specified an event whose odds are greater than 1/10^150, then it could not have been done through "blind search," "random walk" or any other non-purposive search method. We can see immediately (without any base conversion) that 1/27^173,698 is smaller than 1/10^150.
Hamlet could not have been written by any number of monkeys, typing away on any number of typewriters for any amount of time.
I guess we'll just have to return to this mystical idea of an "author/designer" of the play named Shakespeare.
Robert,
Is this really your point? Get yourself a copy of the Blind Watchmaker by Dawkins.
Your example above is a fallacy often associated with Evolution, propagated by Creationists.
The monkey types randomly Z. The monkey dies. The monkey types A. Monkey lives.The monkey types P. The letter does not appear. The monkey types C. The monkey feels good. After a while you've got Act 1, Scene1.
An intelligent "author/designer" could possibly design a machine to pre-select which letters are acceptable (i.e., which ones survive) and which ones unacceptable. That's exactly what programmers do when they design so-called "genetic algorithms" (GAs) purporting to demonstrate evolution with a computer: they invariably sneak in a pre-selected "goal" or "target" for the randomly generated events to move toward -- something which is obviously teleological, and which is strictly verboten in Darwinism.
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