Who cares about Schroeder if someone actually managed to prove that you can.
Schroeder is a physicist.... so I take his word better than mine. He says you can't do it. I gave the link earlier. I can post it again, but if you search it with odds i think it comes up.
Don't get stuck with just using one person, source, scientist, etc for all your knowledge. Spread it out and listen and learn from many sources. The sign of great intelligence isn't the ability to simply understand one person, but the ability to synthesize information from many sources and bring it all together to one thought or idea.
I try not to get stuck one one, it's good advice. But I don't consider myself clever than they, so I can't say that they are wrong on one part... haha , if any of it. I suppose we are led where we think it is right and take what we take, whomever we are.
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If I understand Anderson correctly, he made a monkey-simulator that actually, in real-time, real-world, produced Shakespeare's work through random clicking on virtual keyboard by virtual randomness monkeys. So Schroeder, whoever that is, might not be the one to trust but rather the experiment that succeeded?
Did you know that there are stories and books written by computer software? I think there's a book coming out written by a computer. And there's even a competition, similar to nano-wrimo (I think it's called) where people compete in writing computer software that will produce stories rather than actually writing the stories themselves.
If that doesn't beat the Schroeder's sonnets, then I'm not sure what does.
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Also, there's is an increasing problem with plagiarism using computer-generated essays and useless submissions of computer generated science articles. There was an article submitted to a group of journals around the world a few years ago, which was generated by a computer software. It's basically a lengthy bovine excrement exercise article that didn't say anything useful... but it was accepted by several journals, because they seem to be legit.
Here's one such article:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/rooter.pdf
The one above was accepted as "non-review" articles in some journal.
Here's another one, which was rejected though:
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/scigen/steeve.pdf
Read some in them, and let me know if you think if they seem to be just scramble of letters or words or perhaps seemingly to have some content... but what exactly?
Thanks for the points of interest and links.
I would be interested to know just how the computer does it randomly. It is after all programmed by man, programmed to be random. And computers are not animals. What if the animal, just by a whim, decides to bang his fist on it and bring up all sorts, or just keep clicking one. He might, out of interest go back to that again. How does a computer program do that? Any ideas? I am not convinced that the two are the same. A monkey is alive, a computer is Artificial Intelligence. It will have been programmed to have within it the chance of bringing about the sonnet for ex.... but that is not necessarily the same with an animal.
Either way, we then have to ask why it is that randomness then brings about patterns, do we not?
Why should it? Why should not random stay random? Why should it bring in patterns? It is an interesting thought though..... i suppose if you limit the amount of things you have, and therefore the patterns they can be put in, eventually they must bring about patterns (when comparing the whole and not the parts). This might well be how chaos works. This means then that each bubble-universe is its own closed system, which certainly fit with the idea that it is autonomous to the one before, and then ''that'' which we call God. Thus it gives complete liberty and when judged, means he is completely just, as he had no imput.
(the universes are infinite)
But there is one process that must always work, much like random mutations in evolution it seems, it must always be able to turn into many different things (even if the total is limited) otherwise it is not possible to bring about what we now see, which seems a fairly finished process (even if perhaps it is not) it certainly works well as it does- as a whole and in parts.
But we could say this pattern of a sonnet can come about, but what are the chances then of doing more? For example, life, complete, in this universe, is more than one big bang and that's it. First we need that, which is so unlikely in itself; then there is the odds of stars and then planets, eventually ours, then water, then life starting, then life evolving, and then looking how complex atoms and cells are, and the human body and the immune system etc, and the fact we have coal oil gas waiting to be exploited, etc etc. All those odds stack up to be something horrendous I think.
It all depends on one's point of view of course.
Mine has an obvious starting point. I think it is this complex to make us think that there is intelligence behind it, and thus lead us to him. That would also make sense considering that there are billions who believe and have done for thousands of years.
Sooooo........ what then is the chance of the monkey pc writing out every book in a library in the entire world, and in order, in the time when they were first published? I think it is a little ridiculous personally. Perhaps I speak from knowledge on that, or perhaps from ignorance, but with or without science, it is just way way too much for me to accept that it could all happen by chance..... unless the chance has within it some hidden properties that make it have the chance of bringing about everything we see; and that just sounds contrived, not chance.
Man contives many things I think. Why, I might ask, is that we can even, as apes, begin to explain the universe and everything in it in the first place? My answer: We created it.
