Category: Miscellaneous

Infinite Ape Simulator

  • November 14, 2019

I’ve been thinking about the Infinite Monkey Theorem, which postulates that an infinite amount of monkeys banging away on keyboards randomly forever would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. You can read about this in detail here.

I thought to myself, rather than use dirty monkeys to reproduce Shakespeare (which has been attempted), why not use a machine brain? So I turned to an actual honest-to-goodness computer and wrote a simulation.

My machine was the Commodore 64, and I wrote a simple piece of code to randomly generate three letters in order and test to see if they spelled ‘act’, the first word of Hamlet. I was testing the water, so to speak, instead of diving right into a full reproduction of the entire play.

Now it’s fairly simple statistics to calculate that of the 17576 possible three letter words, only one is ‘act’. But I started by looking for words that started with ‘a’ (ie. of the form a–) of which there are 676, and then words starting with ac-, of which there are 26. I timed my result to see if – as expected – each successively correct letter took approximately 26 times as long to generate as the previous.

Here’s my code alongside one example output looking specifically for ‘act’:

The time is in seconds, and I ran 12 searches each for a– and ac- and 5 (due to the time required) for act. Here are the average times to generate each type of result:

A–: 3 seconds
AC-: 84 seconds
ACT: 2027 seconds

These numbers are close to 26x multiples of each other as expected, and I imagine were I to do enough tests they would converge to that value. From these results we can speculate how long it may take for my C64 to recreate Hamlet…

But first some facts: Hamlet has 132680 letters and 199749 characters in total including spaces and seven punctuation signs. Including these but ignoring case, there are 34 potential candidates for each character and 199749 characters need to be generated. My predictions that follow are based on times equal to 34/26 of those listed above.

The expected (ie. 50% chance) time it would take my C64 to randomly generate Hamlet would be 34^199746 times 1908 seconds which is (approximately) 34^199739 million years. The minimum time is about 1.7 hours ( if it got it right on the first go) and the maximum is of course infinity.

But – given our universe is only less than 14,000 million years old – this means I’m confident in saying my C64 would never randomly generate Hamlet. In fact were I to expand the sim to look for the sequence ‘Act 1’ I would expect the average successful attempt to take about one month. If I extended the sim all the way to the first spoken word – over 100 characters in – I’d expect the Earth would be consumed by the sun before my C64 did it.

Some of you say “that’s just a C64!”, which is primitive compared to the device you’re reading this on. But even if your fancy phone or laptop is a trillion times more powerful, this is nothing compared to a factor of ~10^200k.

It’s pleasant to think of infinite typing apes (or computers) randomly spewing out a work of art, but it would never happen 🙂

(Incidentally and somewhat related; the world is still awaiting the results of B’s testing of this!)

Inktober 2019

  • November 1, 2019

I did ‘Inktober’ again! This is where artists – such as myself – create and share a new piece every day in October. I used the same app as last year and once again followed no theme, making each piece up as I went along. You’ve already seen one example in the previous post; here I’ll show more.

They started off rather simple. The above was inspired by a dream in which I was tending a strange plant just like the one drawn. I was still getting refamiliarizing myself with the app at this point.

That was drawn after listening to Bela Lugosi’s Dead over and over again (“The virginal brides file past his tomb…“). I wanted to superimpose a window over it with Dracula looking out but lacked the skill.

This one was inspired after watching a YouTube video about the days of airships flying over NYC. It also features silhouettes, which were a common motif this year.

One day, when I was very tired after my 11.5 hours at work, SMC sent a dazzling photo of an ocean sunset in Vanuatu. I used it as inspiration for the above. To be honest I could have put more detail in but I was simply too exhausted!

Around halfway through the month I developed a few new tricks that allowed me to squeeze a bit more detail out of what is a very limited drawing app. This simple sketch of a tower was an early example, but things progressed in time to pieces like this:

And eventually this:

The above is my favorite drawing of not just this years group, but last year as well. I feel I – finally – achieved what I wanted with the starfield and the lighting of the silhouette and enjoyed reusing the tower from earlier. I wonder who lives there?

Another Inktober is now over, and my talents will – at least for the next 11 months – remain exclusive to cards and postcards. But I’m sure I’ll be back for Inktober 2020!

Postcrossing Century!

  • October 19, 2019

The other day I received my 100th Postcrossing postcard! I thought it appropriate to give an update to celebrate the occasion!

In the 10 months since I sent my first card I’ve received cards from 27 countries and sent them to 32. While I have sent cards to Australia, South America and South Africa, I have yet to receive any from there, so I’m still waiting to have a card from every continent (bar Antarctica of course). Here’s the stats:

Cards ‘expire’ after 90 days, which means you can request a new address even if one doesn’t arrive. While the South African one was technically expired, it eventually arrived and was registered by the recipient who lives on a tiny island off the west coast of Africa and said his mail service is sporadic! I’ve had three other expired cards to date, all to Eastern European countries.

You can see Germany is above and beyond the most popular country for Postcrossing, but I have to say I’m most surprised by China. While it’s a bit scary to be given addresses in that country (since it’s difficult to write Chinese characters!) I’ve never had one not arrive so I must be doing ok 🙂

The cards themselves run the gamut, but since I have requested classic tourist cards, animal cards and pinup cards I tend to mostly get those. I’ve made it clear I’m interested in the stamps as well and get a great selection from all over the world.

The Russian scientist stamp is great isn’t it? Germany has a few series of lovely connected landscape stamps and Japanese stamps are always graphic and very pretty. Take a look at the effort this guy put in to cram as many stamps as possible on his card from Japan:

Or these two Chinese cards:

Of the cards themselves I love them all, but some have been particularly notable. I’ll feature two here, both Australian postcards but neither being sent from Australia! This one came from Germany:

And this one from Taiwan:

The latter is particularly great since the card itself is old – maybe 1980s – and I imagine she either found it in her parents collection or in a used bookstore! (And no, there’s no way people sending cards to me would know I am Australian which makes both of these even more amusing!)

These days I can send up to 11 cards at a time, and receive about 10 a month on average. At that rate I’ll get to 200 sometime around next August. Let’s hope at least some of those come from the Southern Hemisphere!