More or less exactly the same

Tuesday, 2 March 2010 09:13 by ebenroux

In high school I had a maths teacher that would show us various problems with solutions and simply state that they are "More or less exactly the same".

I recently came across the Infinite Monkey Theorem.  This got me thinking about how we humans approach some things in a really weird way.  I mean, having a random number generator create the complete works of Shakespeare (or any body of work for that matter) is just plain silly.  The probability is somehow calculated.  Now, I believe some things are not possible, or even probable.

When one switches on a television that has not been tuned you see some form of Brownian Movement.  This seems quite random to me.  In fact, we can simulate the same thing using a computer and simply place dots all over the display; something, I'm sure, most programmers have done at some stage while learning to code.

Taking into account how many possible images exist one may expect that at some stage a recognizable image would appear.  It never will.  It seems strange to say that since the probability associated with a recognizable image is now a big fat 0.

What is the probability of taking a tour through the universe and digging through every single planet and finding a perfectly formed clay brick.  I mean, a simple brick.  Not something that looks like a brick.  Even that seems strange.

The big thing is that we have intelligence on our side.  Our DNA contains informattion that didn't appear at random.  Having a bunch of monkeys type up the text in the latest copy of People magazine seems trivial compared to that.

To summarise: saying something is so doesn't necesaarily make it so, even if you use a mathematical model.
Categories:   Personal | Religion
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