Programming

[Spacecadet]

Its been said that a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of shakespeare.


Sometimes when programming .NET apps, I feel that I am one of those monkeys

[moorfield]

Its been said that a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of shakespeare.


Sometimes when programming .NET apps, I feel that I am one of those monkeys

a million offshore developers will eventually produce a line of code that compiles

[MrRobin]

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 x 10^28) roughly equivalent to the probability of buying 4 lottery tickets consecutively and winning the jackpot each time. In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. Say the text of Hamlet contains 130,000 letters (it is actually more, even stripped of punctuation), then there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10^183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10^183,946

For comparison purposes, there are only about 3 × 10^79 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe and only 4.3 × 10^17 seconds have elapsed since the Big Bang. Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys typing for all time, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be less than one in 10^183,800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event…", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

[Cliphead]

Ignoring punctuation, spacing, and capitalization, a monkey typing letters uniformly at random has a chance of one in 26 of correctly typing the first letter of Hamlet. It has a chance of one in 676 (26 × 26) of typing the first two letters. Because the probability shrinks exponentially, at 20 letters it already has only a chance of one in 26^20 = 19,928,148,895,209,409,152,340,197,376 (almost 2 x 10^28) roughly equivalent to the probability of buying 4 lottery tickets consecutively and winning the jackpot each time. In the case of the entire text of Hamlet, the probabilities are so vanishingly small they can barely be conceived in human terms. Say the text of Hamlet contains 130,000 letters (it is actually more, even stripped of punctuation), then there is a probability of one in 3.4 × 10^183,946 to get the text right at the first trial. The average number of letters that needs to be typed until the text appears is also 3.4 × 10^183,946

For comparison purposes, there are only about 3 × 10^79 hydrogen atoms in the observable universe and only 4.3 × 10^17 seconds have elapsed since the Big Bang. Even if the observable universe were filled with monkeys typing for all time, their total probability to produce a single instance of Hamlet would still be less than one in 10^183,800. As Kittel and Kroemer put it, "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event…", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

You need to get out more

[OwlHoot]

Its been said that a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of shakespeare.


Sometimes when programming .NET apps, I feel that I am one of those monkeys

Sometimes I feel it was ten thousand Microsoft monkeys who wrote .NET, although it could be worse.

[moorfield]

and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

So does the same apply to offshore developers then ?

[threaded]

Its been said that a million monkeys in a room with a million typewriters will eventually produce the works of shakespeare.

But now with the invention of the internet we know this isn't true...

threaded in "plagarised from somewhere" mode