An experiment??

Qoeleth · #1 May 30, '12, 10:40 pm

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

**GEddie** · #2 May 30, '12, 11:28 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

No, it would not.

The earth would fall into the sun (or the sun would go cold) long before you paged through all of the gobbledygook that would compose 99.9999 percent of those typed pages.

Informational entropy at it's purest.

ICXC NIKA

StrawberryJam · #3 May 30, '12, 11:44 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

Someone will say, it could simply be boiled down to very few words.

God is love

LostChemist · #4 May 31, '12, 12:47 am

Eventually, sure, why not? Statistically speaking, there is an almost zero chance of this ever happening, but that remote chance is still there.

**GEddie** · #5 May 31, '12, 6:52 am

Not everything can be described in one typed page!

Alberti_Devoveo · #6 May 31, '12, 7:11 am

Assuming standard borders, using Times New Roman font at a 12 pt font size, about 3000 characters can be typed on a page. There are 26 letters, 32 symbols, and 10 numbers on a standard American keyboard. Since characters are repeatable, it's a N^M type formula (N is the number of characters per page and M is the number of characters).

Thus: 2.8x10236 possible combinations of characters on a page.

The estimated total number of particles in the observable universe is 1080 and the number of seconds elapsed since the big bang is roughly 4.6x1017, I would say that it would be impossible to ever do so.

Gaber · #7 May 31, '12, 9:37 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

Cool. Absolutely anything you can write on the paper is what you think you are. The paper, blank or written upon, is what you actually are in essence.

Boulder257 · #8 May 31, '12, 9:38 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Alberti_Devoveo

Assuming standard borders, using Times New Roman font at a 12 pt font size, about 3000 characters can be typed on a page. There are 26 letters, 32 symbols, and 10 numbers on a standard American keyboard. Since characters are repeatable, it's a N^M type formula (N is the number of characters per page and M is the number of characters).

Thus: 2.8x10236 possible combinations of characters on a page.

The estimated total number of particles in the observable universe is 1080 and the number of seconds elapsed since the big bang is roughly 4.6x1017, I would say that it would be impossible to ever do so.

Well there is the problem...you just need smaller font!

**GEddie** · #9 May 31, '12, 10:50 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Boulder257

Well there is the problem...you just need smaller font!

Or a high-speed printer.

ThinkingSapien · #10 May 31, '12, 10:57 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

Nope. Pretty sure it would not work.

The amount of time needed to produce meaningful sentences could be dramatically reduced through adding grammatical constraints to the text strings that are generated. But that still isn't practical.

MPat · #11 May 31, '12, 11:08 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

In other words, it's something similar to the "library" described in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel..?

TheTrueCentrist · #12 May 31, '12, 11:25 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by Qoeleth

Consider this- imagine the possibilities of what could be expressed on a single page of text. Such a page of text could possibly express:
- an infinitely true and perfectly expressed and summarised formulation of the meaning of life;
- a true and clear explanation of Trinity, the problem of evil, etc.
- the true biography of everyone who ever lived,
- the best poem every written,
- the secret name of God (if you believe in that kind of thing)
- a description of the scientific principle for a time machine, or cold fusion generator, a cure for cancer, or any number of things not yet invented.

Now, given the finitude of letters and other standard characters (puncutation marks, digits, etc.) it is obvious that the number of combinations making a single typed page is also finite. Maybe some mathematically minded person could work it out, as to hoe many combinations there could be.

So, this is my proposed experiment- set up a computer to type at random letters, characters, punction and spaces. This will produce a finite number of typed sheets. Read through each typed sheet to find the sheet which contains every conceivable truth.

Would it work?

It might be possible in some language, but probably not English. If we consider a page to have ~4000 characters (obviously this depends on font size,) then we can calculate things. There would be 36^(4000) possible combinations of characters if we restrict ourselves to only 10 symbols. Obviously, only a tiny, tiny fraction of those combinations will be meaningful. However, if we tried to generate all possible combinations, we would be effectively unable to do so. If every atom in the universe generated 100 pages / second since the beginning of the universe, we would not have even generated 0.01% of the pages yet.

If we say that a page is comprised of 250 words, and that there are 600,000 words in the English language, then there would be 600,000^250 possible combinations. That number is significantly smaller than the number of characters, however we would still be unable to generate all possible combinations.

Alberti_Devoveo · #13 May 31, '12, 11:48 am

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheTrueCentrist

It might be possible in some language, but probably not English. If we consider a page to have ~4000 characters (obviously this depends on font size,) then we can calculate things. There would be 36^(4000) possible combinations of characters if we restrict ourselves to only 10 symbols. Obviously, only a tiny, tiny fraction of those combinations will be meaningful. However, if we tried to generate all possible combinations, we would be effectively unable to do so. If every atom in the universe generated 100 pages / second since the beginning of the universe, we would not have even generated 0.01% of the pages yet.

If we say that a page is comprised of 250 words, and that there are 600,000 words in the English language, then there would be 600,000^250 possible combinations. That number is significantly smaller than the number of characters, however we would still be unable to generate all possible combinations.

After reading this, I realized that I made an error in my calculation on my post: I put 3000^68 which gives ~10236 compared to the value of ~105400 for 68^3000.

LostChemist · #14 May 31, '12, 11:57 am

So, these numbers are to try EVERY combination right? But statistically speaking, we might get it "right" after only 5 tries for example. So... There is still the very remote possibility that we could achieve this once in the lifetime of the universe, not at all, or 5 times for all we know. It's nice to know the numbers though! Thanks for doing the math!

ThinkingSapien · #15 May 31, '12, 1:09 pm

Quote:

Originally Posted by LostChemist

So, these numbers are to try EVERY combination right? But statistically speaking, we might get it "right" after only 5 tries for example. So... There is still the very remote possibility that we could achieve this once in the lifetime of the universe, not at all, or 5 times for all we know. It's nice to know the numbers though! Thanks for doing the math!

Statistically speaking, I think our time is better spent. Not only is the possibility astronomically remote but if you did end up with something useful on paper than how do you recognize it from the rest of the overwhelming amount of garbage that this process would produce? How would you go about investigating the claims this process produces (for the few that may appear coherent)?