For those of you who may have thought that this was possible, I'm afraid it is not. Yes, I was lying about having a patent pending. FerretBoy was right. To do this it would take a lot of paper.

No computer that exists today could calculate anywhere near fast enough to do this in any reasonable amount of time. In fact, just attempting to calculate the number of possible combinations would overload your desktop.

Let's say I just wanted to print out every possible sentence, up to 65 characters long (as opposed to 1,000 pages of characters long). There are 26 letters, 10 numbers, and let's say 14 common signs and punctuation marks including blank spaces. So that's 50 possible characters for each of the 65 spaces on each line. That means there are 50^65 possible combinations, which is equal to 10^110.

To get an idea of how large that number actually is, imagine that every atom in the universe represents a computer printing out these different combinations, so that we have 3x10^74 machines working simulaneously together. Now assume that these machines have been working continuously since the creation of the universe, that is for a period of 3x10^9 years or 10^17 seconds, printing at the rate of atomic vibrations, that is, 10^15 lines per second. By now they would have printed out about:

3x10^74 x 10^17 x 10^15 = 3x10^106 lines

...which is only about one thirteenth of 1 percent of the total amount required. And that's only for 1 line, not one thousand pages. So yeah, I'm gonna start working on my perpetual motion machine instead.

I actually got this idea and the above calculations from a book called One Two Three...Infinity by George Gamow. Anyone want to know what the odds are that all the air molecules in the room you are sitting in will unexpectedly collect in a far corner of the room, leaving you to suffocate in your chair?

all the air molecules in the room you are sitting in will unexpectedly collect in a far corner of the room, leaving you to suffocate in your chair?

now THAT would be cool. not so much the suffocating... but the molecular thing.

In one of my thermodynamics classes while talking about entropy, the professor actually showed us how to do the calculation for determining the likelyhood of all the ice in Antarctica melting at the same time.

If the class wasn't right around lunch time, maybe I would've paid enough attention to remember how he did that...

Yeah there's all kinds of cool stuff that can happen by chance. Like when you're drinking a cup of coffee, there's a a very remote chance that the bottom half of the coffee will freeze while the top half boils. It is so remote of a chance that it is very unlikely that it would ever happen in billions of years. Or, if every molecule bounces in the right direction at the right time, a set of clean dishes could put themselves away.

Anyone want to know what the odds are that all the air molecules in the room you are sitting in will unexpectedly collect in a far corner of the room, leaving you to suffocate in your chair?

While I'm not disputing the fun to be had playing with astronomically large numbers, the actual odds of the air molecules staying there long enough for you to suffocate are zero. Air pressure is a statistical-mechanics phenomenon, and while in normal circumstances the mechanics is such that the statistics applies, in edge cases it isn't. In this instance, air molecules are constantly moving, and change direction only when they hit obstacles or other air molecules. Once they're all at one end of the room, there's literally nothing to stop them heading straight back again, just as if you'd opened a can of compressed air in a vacuum. There's no way that collisions alone can result in none of them having any velocity in the x-direction.

Peter

So yeah, I'm gonna start working on my perpetual motion machine instead.


Or you could calculate Pi. It can't be too hard, because it has its own button on my calculator.

Sheesh, I don't know what happened to the picture of my machine... They must have replaced it with a picture of a common Pop Tart...

imagine that every atom in the universe represents a computer printing out these different combinations

Given this set of conditions, I wonder how well this would do with this little experiment or some of these projects or this small endeavour.

My team stats would beat HardOCP!

It would take a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, a million years to come up with a good reason that we reply to anything that d33zy says.

d33zy...monkey....typewriter....hmm...

There is a joke there somewhere.

Then why are you wasting your time trying to put to me down.

Anyone want to know what the odds are that all the air molecules in the room you are sitting in will unexpectedly collect in a far corner of the room, leaving you to suffocate in your chair?

Speaking of patents, I'd like to point out that this idea is more or less already patented:

"The principle of generating small amounts of finite improbability by simply hooking the logic circuits of a Bambleweeny 57 Sub-Meson Brain to an atomic vector plotter suspended in a strong Brownian Motion producer (say a nice hot cup of tea) was of course well understood - and such generators were often used to break the ice at parties by making all the molecules in the hostess's undergarments leap simultaneously one foot to the left, in accordance with the Theory of Indeterminacy."

For more information, I suggest consulting the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Oh my Lord. I almost hurt myself laughing at that post.

God, I'm gonna miss that man.... The rest of that entry to the Guide is brilliant as well.....

It would take a million monkeys typing on a million typewriters, a million years to come up with a good reason that we reply to anything that d33zy says.

But an infinite number of monkeys could reply instantly