• Question: If you knew how fast the average monkey would type, how many years would it take for a monkey to type out the entire bible if they randomly pressed keys? Theres about 104 keys but im not sure how to find the answer.

    Asked by anon-267449 on 23 Nov 2020.
    • Photo: Bradley Young

      Bradley Young answered on 23 Nov 2020: last edited 23 Nov 2020 7:57 pm

      I would do this by using a probability formula (permutations with replacement):
      —
      If I have a sample size of 27 (26 letters and the ‘space’ key) and I want to have a word of 3 letters followed by a space (4 characters) then there are 27^4 (27 to the power of 4 = 531,441) possible strings of characters. So the chance of typing it right is 1/531441 (=0.000002). So the number of tries before I am likely to type it right by pressing random keys is 368,366 (you work this out by working out the chance that you don’t get it wrong ‘x’ times in a row).
      —
      Now, if I use 3,500,000 characters (roughly the number of characters in the King James Bible) then I couldn’t calculate the number of tries before I am likely to type it right by pressing random keys because the numbers are too big. But what I can tell you is that you would need more time than since the beginning of the universe
      —
      If I wanted to type a 13 letter word then I would need to try about once every second since the beginning of the universe until now before I was likely to get it right by pressing random keys

    • Photo: Iain Tullis

      Iain Tullis answered on 24 Nov 2020:

      27^3500000 is about 10^5009773
      .
      or 10^(10^6.7)

    • Photo: Adrien Chauvet

      Adrien Chauvet answered on 24 Nov 2020:

      … because the question is loaded, I prefer to respond to the loading instead of responding to the question itself 🙂
      As a believer, I do believe that God is behind all that we see around us. But from a material point of view, I simply have no other theory, beside evolution, to explain my presence on Earth, and it turns out that this theory does not conflict with my beliefs.
      Now, the creationist argument that says that the DNA code could not happened by mere random recombination, mutation, etc. is certainly valid, but it neglect other physical properties that tends to foster aggregation of amino-acids and direct their assembly in a specific way.
      For example, bio-molecules in water tends to create “rafts”, which increases their concentrations in specific areas. Hence, we are not talking about random motion of amino acids in water bumping into one-another to create DNA, but of highly concentrated pool of amino acids that self-assemble due to steric forces.
      The more we discover such physical constraints, the less random the process becomes… and this argument slowly vanishes.
      To conclude, while I do realise the simplistic arguments underlying the theory of evolution, I also try to avoid using similar simplistic argument to prove the truth of what I believe.
      – food for thoughts-

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