Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus not contained

Re:Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus... by baq on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @03:05AM (#22421280)

if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and wait a million years, you're bound to get all works of Shakespeare by chance alone. yes, bad luck, but the fact it happened illustrates the scale.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus... by LandR on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:47AM (#22421694)

No, I think this only applies to an infinite amount of monkeys or you wait an infinitely long time.

Infinite != million years.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus... by iso1210 on Wednesday February 26, 2020 @04:56AM (#22421726)

> if you give a million monkeys a typewriter and wait a million years

You'll have faeces and dead monkeys everywhere.

Lets assume you have a million monkeys pressing 10 keys per second for 1 million years.

You'd get somewhere in the region of 10^21 letters, or

Lets ignore punctuation, numbers, capitals etc, and assume there's just a choice of 26 letters

You'd be insanely lucky to find "all the world's a stage" somewhere in there.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Tokyo Olympics “looking at a cancellation” if coronavirus... by knowmylimits on Thursday February 27, 2020 @08:43AM (#22433122)

He's just doing his take on probability not literally. That's like if I asked you: How many second are in a year?

[ Parent | on HN ]