Today I read this quotation from Robert Wilensky on the Internet.
- We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.
with now more than 60 million blogs on the internet (including this one), and (i safely assume) most of those bloggers do use a keyboard, we should have got few sets of "complete works of Shakespeare" by now. Well, we all know that the sad truth is we still have only one Shakespeare. Random selection (event a large number of selections) will lead to nothing meaningful.
This reminded me of something else. In Richard Dawkins' 1987 BBC documentary "The Blind Watchmaker", this great evolutionist and atheist showed us a computer program (in C?) which could simulate natural selection on genetic structures. It shows that natural selection is not random or "by pure chances" ... random selection will lead to nothing. However, when "only the fittest survive" rule was applied, the program showed that computer simulated genetic structures can actually evolve. After number of generations, it will develop certain features that best suit it's surrounding environment.
What I am trying to say here is that by randomly selecting 1 million monkeys at a million keyboards probably would not produce any works of Shakespeare, however, if we can enforce certain rules (grammar) on those monkeys and their "writings" (typing), it could actually lead to something, not Shakespeare himself but something more like ... the current blog world maybe? just a thought :-) ....
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