What the book 'The Cat In The Hat' tells us about the typing monkeys
And the obvious implications of that with respect to the magical chemical blob in the sea a few billion years ago.
There are various sayings about typing monkeys, including ones using infinite monkeys and infinite time. I recall hearing a version with one billion monkeys and one billion years. Since infinity of anything is nebulous and purely theoretical with respect to human existence, and even with respect to theories about the age of the earth and of the universe, it’s fairly pointless to suggest that there are an infinite number of anything or that there is infinite time.
Since there are about 8 billion people on the planet now, let’s round up and go with 10 billion monkeys. Since the earth is claimed to be about 4.5 billion years old and the universe 15 billion or so years old, let’s go with 10 billion years. Note that I have not done any research lately to see if these ages have been stretched out more to try and make things more believable. I do know they have been extended in the past.
So let’s say we’ve got 10 billion monkeys, and they’ve got 10 billion years to type randomly on computers. (Yes the old versions of the story involved typewriters, but pretty much nobody is using typewriters anymore.) I’ve heard about how the monkeys would be able to randomly type out ‘War and Peace’, and the link I included above mentions the entire works of Shakespeare. I think either of those options is being a bit too hard on the monkeys, so I chose something much easier. Surely ‘The Cat In The Hat’ is doable.
For starters, we need to figure out how many characters are available on a typical/standard computer keyboard. Upper and lower case letters, digits 0-9, and the punctuation get us to around 70. Obviously the monkeys have to randomly hold down the shift key to get upper case letters and some of the punctuation characters, so the shift key is another. Factor in the other special characters, the spacebar, the backspace key, the delete key, the caps lock key, carriage return/enter, num lock, etc. and you’re getting close to 90. The function keys and other special keys get you over 100. Of course some of those were not found on old style typewriters. For simplicity in calculation, let’s just go with 100.
Next we need to know the number of characters found in ‘The Cat In The Hat’. If we look at the first page, we can do an initial estimate. (Again I’ll note that this is fair use.)
Counting punctuation and spaces, there are roughly 100 characters on that first page. So we have 100 possible options of keystrokes, and 100 characters to randomly type in order.
We’ll ignore the monkeys hitting the delete key for now, or hitting the escape key or any other key combination that could cause problems. We’ll also assume it’s equally likely that they will hold down the shift key to get capital letters with equal probability of hitting single keys. Both the ignoring and the assuming above work in the monkeys favor big time, but this exercise is all about simplifying things.
The probability of any monkey typing that first capital “T” 1 out of 100, or 1/100th if you prefer. Hitting the “h” on the 2nd keystroke is also 1 out of 100, as is hitting any of the others. But what is the probability of hitting the “T” and then the “h” in order? That is 1/100 x 1/100, which is now 1 out of 10,000. To get the “e” and finish off the “The” first word we multiply by 1/100 again, and now we’re at a 1 in a million chance of randomly typing just that word.
Things are getting less likely very quickly aren’t they? Maybe some of you are doubting this, so get out a coin and try it. The odds of a flipped coin landing on heads are 50%, or 1 out of 2. Very easy to understand that. What about 2 heads flips in a row? That’s 1/2 x 1/2 = 1/4, which is of course also a 25% chance. For 3 heads in a row we multiply by 1/2 again, and it gets down to 1/8 or 12.5%. To get 4 heads in a row we get down to 6.25%, and 5 heads would be a 3.125% chance.
5 heads in a row is the value I suggest you try to get, in order to confirm that it’s not very likely as you do a bunch of coin flips to test it out. A little over 3 chances out of 100 is still FAR better odds than 1 in a million, but the point is to show how much more difficult it becomes when things must all happen in sequence and always be right.
So to type out just the first page of ‘The Cat In The Hat’, any given monkey’s chances are 1/100 to the 100th power, which is 1 chance in 10 to the 200th power.
That is 1 in 100000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. I’m not bothering with commas since I don’t know of an “illion” name for that large number. (WP has one for 10 to the 303 power on the “short scale” the U.S. uses.)
It’s kinda like that meme with Will Ferrell:
But hey, we’ve got 10 billion monkeys and they’ve got 10 billion years. What if we say they are fast typers and they can get in 1,000 tries per day? That’s 365,000 tries per year per monkey. So for all time each monkey gets 3,650,000,000,000,000 tries, or 3.65 quadrillion tries. With all 10 billion monkeys we now get to:
36,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is 36.5 Septillion tries.
Another way of putting that is 3.65 x 10 to the 25th power. To simplify and to help the monkeys out some more, let’s round up to 1 x 10 to the 26th power. (This also helps if you think the monkeys should be able to type even faster, as this number is saying they’re getting in almost 3,000 tries per day.)
I don’t know about you, but even if we assume that the monkeys type a unique try every single time, with no monkey ever duplicating himself or any other monkey even once, I don’t like my chances of the monkeys typing it out right!!
AND THAT’S JUST THE FIRST PAGE OF A CHILDREN’S BOOK!!!
The second page of ‘The Cat In The Hat’ has close to 200 characters. The 3rd page and the next page with letters (the 5th) add about 100 more characters. So on just the first 4 pages with text we’ve got about 400 keys to be pushed in the right order, and using the math above are chances are now 1 in 10 to the 800th power!!! Even if we increase to 1 trillion monkeys and give them 1 trillion years, and again make all the assumptions above in favor of our monkeys, they don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of accidentally/randomly typing out the first 4 pages in ‘The Cat In The Hat’.
So now try adding in the rest of the book. Just a quick visual estimate I get another 5500 characters/spaces/punctuation. Let’s say it’s 6,000 total in the whole simple children’s book. Now we need the monkeys to succeed with 1 in 1 x 10 to the 12,000th power odds on each try. And if they have to type out the whole book or something of similar length, they aren’t going to get 1,000 tries per day. Of course it wouldn’t even matter if they got 10,000 tries per day.
That only increases their chances by an order of magnitude, to 3.65 million tries per monkey per year. The increase to 1 trillion monkeys is only another 2 orders of magnitude in the full odds calculation, and ditto for the increase to 1 trillion years such that it’s 5 total orders of magnitude better. So we’ve got 10 to the 31st power tries out of the 10 to the 12,000th power of possibilities.
Moving right along to that super special magical chemical blob in the sea, think of the very monkey friendly assumptions we made above, and consider those as chemical attraction/affinity or whatever you want to call it working in favor of that magical blob billions of years ago. Add in some sort of property which makes the monkeys hit the lower case letter keys MUCH more often than anything else, and also hit the vowel keys even more often, and the space bar most often. So you need more monkey friendly twists to even have a decent chance of typing actual words as opposed to just a string of the possible keystrokes.
So in the chemical world you’ve now made more massive assumptions for that chemical blob to form into something as well, and even with all that, try comparing the complexity and information within DNA to the contents of ‘The Cat In The Hat’. On top of that, in our typing example we have confined ourselves to 100 possible options for what gets typed, and we’ve ruled out the possibility of an event that wipes out what was typed so far. When it comes to chemicals spontaneously forming into something very complex, these are almost certainly ridiculously optimistic choices.
DNA contains exponentially more information than the content in ‘The Cat In The Hat’, but a Darwinist will still tell you DNA and all life on this planet happened randomly and accidentally.
What I’ll tell you is that the Darwinists are full of it, and I’ve already covered how the typing monkeys have no chance either. Prove me wrong in the comments.
P.S. It’s worth noting that for the Powerball lotto jackpot prize the odds are 1 in 292,201,338. This is even though the order of your first 5 picks does NOT matter, and none of those first 5 can be duplicated in a pick. The odds of hitting the first 5 are 1 in 11,688,054, which is MUCH better. (But still very unlikely.)
That gives you the same idea of just how much having the correct order matters, as the Powerball number is separate and could match one of the others. I’m throwing this note in for those that don’t know statistics at all and who doubt my calculations above. Just one extra separate pick with only 26 possible options takes you from 1 in less than 12 million odds to 1 in more than 292 million odds.