Friday, March 16, 2012

Surely monkeys will laugh at it

Solid statistics collected for over two decades, validate the observation that I must belong to the top 95 percentile of population when it comes to the ability to come up with good jokes. (And I figure somewhere in the 50 percentile range on the parameter of modesty)

Anyways, so the thing is, my jokes usually get at least three laughs on an average. That is the usual trend. However, my last joke was not very appreciated. In fact, Ksh proceeded to laugh at it, instead of laughing because of its high humor quotient. It was obvious that I feel offended. So the thing goes like this:

It has been said that given sufficient amount of time, an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters can reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare (Infinite Monkey Theorem). So the question is – this theorem is in violation of which law of physics?
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The answer is – The second law of Thermodynamics.
Let me explain. A monkey on a typewriter punching random keys will produce garbage. Garbage has a tendency to remain garbage even if its constituents are reassembled. Hence, it has high randomness and thus high entropy. On the contrary, any piece of work by Shakespeare is very unique in its specifications. Any changes shall result in ruining the entire thing. So it has no randomness at all and thus very low entropy. Now, the second law implies that over time, systems tend to go from low entropy to high. Hence, the law kind of says that contrary to the infinite monkey theorem, given sufficient amount of time, a number of Shakespeare clones will produce large amounts of garbage. 

QED