mad825 said:
Jonluw said:
It's not a question of how often the monkey will press the keys; the fact of the matter is that the monkey will favourize certain keys and patterns. What keys the monkey presses will never be random, and therefore, the complete works of Shakespeare will never be written.
so long as it's possible no matter how unlikely, it will happen
you are favouring logic in a illogical world.
they have an infinite amount of time therefore we can say that there will be a time when they don't do that. the possibilities are
limitless
Yes, but due to the monkey's behavioral patterns, it is not possible for it to type the complete works of Shakespeare. For example, for the sake of argument, the monkey might type the letter 'k' every five letters for a century, and then move on to typing the letter 'd' every five letters for the next century. If the monkey had been typing letters randomly, the complete works of Shakespeare would come out of it sooner or later; but a monkey at a typewriter isn't typing randomly.
Listen; don't take my word for it. I think I read it in a science illustrated article or something. Try googling it.
Edit: "To get right to it, the problem with the current answer is that it assumes, without proof or argument, that taking a random string of items to infinity will necessarily cover all possibilities. That is to say, those who assert the monkey theorem assume that in infinite time the monkeys will type everything: all combinations will be covered. That is a false assumption.
It is easy to propose an infinite number of combinations where all possible combinations are not covered. Let us say that we take Ricky Gervais to a basketball court and allow him to shoot baskets. No matter how long we leave him there, he will never be caught slam dunking the basketball. We could leave an infinite number of short guys there an infinite time, and we would never find any of them slam dunking the basketball. What we would find, instead, is an infinite number of similar non-dunking combinations."
Taken from http://milesmathis.com/monkey.html : The first hit when I googled "Monkey typewriter false".
