STuff I Did

Now, that’s just stupid. And so it is, but it exposes the monkey in the experiment. These types of games have a habit of ignoring limits.

I know the monkey is just a placeholder for randomness, but let us swing with this monkey for a bit. The Paignton Zoo stuck a keyboard in with a troop of monkeys. This resulted in the monkeys producing long strings of s’s. They then capped their work by crapping on the keyboard. The whine was that the test was imperfect, given the keyboard has an auto-repeat feature. And this perfectly points out the limit problem. This monkey-typewriter experiment might work if:

The monkey never gets bored and quits.

The monkey never gets sucked up in a tornado.

The monkey doesn’t starve to death.

The sun doesn’t red giant and consume the earth.

In other words, we could state:

If an intelligent designer sets the limits of the experiment in order that a monkey on a typewriter can produce the works of William Shakespeare, then a monkey on a typewriter can produce the works of William Shakespeare.

A statement that conforms to this type of premise is unarguable, but also completely useless. In this case it is worse than useless, because the point of this thought experiment was to exclude intelligent design from perceived order.

We can’t stop there. What if we found an alien race that hissed for language; would the macaque’s string of s’s suddenly become the works of William Shakespeare? Alternatively, what if we went to an alien planet, and their squiggles to get their pens working turned out to be the works of William Shakespeare in English? This, then, delivers our axiom: