On Apr 13, 10:49 am, Carsten Haese <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Fri, 2007-04-13 at 10:22 -0500, Michael Bentley 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: > > Actually, the OP seems to be interested in generating *all* strings of > length N. If you generate the set of *all* strings of 5 million > characters length, at least one of them will contain all works of > Shakespeare. That statement is utterly true and utterly impractical, > which is, of course, the point of Paul's joke. > > -Carsten
But even random typing will *eventually* get there (where "eventually" = several gazillion times the age of the universe) - see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem. -- Paul If I see farther, it is because I stand on the shoulders of an infinite number of monkeys. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
