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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

Given the sheer quantity of people who post their thoughts about Apple, you can probably find one or two who made an accurate prediction about any product release.

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It's almost like Shakespeare's monkeys! :)

"The relevance of the theorem is questionable—the probability of a universe full of monkeys typing a complete work such as Shakespeare's Hamlet is so tiny that the chance of it occurring during a period of time hundreds of thousands of orders of magnitude longer than the age of the universe is extremely low (but technically not zero)."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

But it's not about "a universe full of monkeys", it's about Infinite monkeys. Significantly more.

For some values of universe anyway.

Infinite monkeys would also produce infinite crap. Infinity means everything is going to happen.

As in poop or as in Dan Brown novels?

Both! On a related note, if you had infinite Dan Browns typing on typewriters, you would end up with infinite novels that all follow the same formula.

Actually it's about a single monkey typing for an infinite amount of time. Which is the best thing you can hope for, since you can't really get an infinite amount of monkeys.

You may have difficulty blocking out an infinite amount of time for the task.

And even if somehow you did, that single monkey won't do as they have trouble focusing on a task and tend to die after non-infinite time periods.

So unless we can bridge the "infinite monkey problem" and the concomitant "infinite monkey poop problem", I'm afraid monkey Hamlet shall stay unwrit.

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