On Apr 13, 10:22 am, Michael Bentley <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
wrote:
> On Apr 13, 2007, at 9:19 AM, Paul McGuire wrote:
>
> > If you just expand the length to five million* or so, one of those
> > strings will contain all the works of Shakespeare.
>
> Not likely, even with a tiny sampling of the works of Shakespeare:
>
> # :-)
>
> import string
> import random
>
> def main(bardText, maxTries=5000000):
> tries = 0
> while tries < maxTries:
> tries += 1
> attempt = []
> for letter in bardText.lower():
> if random.choice(
> string.lowercase[:26]
> + string.punctuation
> + ' '
> ) == letter:
> attempt.append(letter)
> else:
> break
> if len(attempt) >= 4:
> print '%d: %s' % (
> tries,
> ''.join(attempt)
> )
>
> if __name__ == "__main__":
> main("Alas, poor Yorick!")
5000000 << infinity
Keep tryin'!
Also, the OP's technique was not doing random string permutations, but
generating an exhaustive list of all possible sequences from aaa... to
zzz... . So I think the works of Shakespeare are *bound* to be in
there somewhere.
For proof, here's an extract from my sample code from running this
exhaustive program with length=14:
...
ALASPOORYORICG
ALASPOORYORICH
ALASPOORYORICI
ALASPOORYORICJ
ALASPOORYORICK
ALASPOORYORICL
ALASPOORYORICM
ALASPOORYORICN
ALASPOORYORICO
...
-- Paul
:) (too late for April 1, unfortunately)
--
http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
