I’m that if your old enough and your education hasn’t been ruined by involvement in gematria that you’ve heard the old saying about “An infinite number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of typewriters will eventually recreate the works of Shakespeare”. It’s probably best to just call it a lot of monkeys and a lot of typewriters. The actual concept of infinity and math behind it blows people’s minds. And the saying reflects it with so many variations used. Maybe someone will just stop at a million monkeys because that’s the biggest number they think they could get away with and not sound too greedy.
Now don’t get too involved with the math if that doesn’t suit you, but go to the Probabilities part of the linked article and the answer is math lingo for, “Ain’t gonna happen”.
The wording of the monkey theorem is intended to convey that random gibberish, given enough time, will eventually produce something meaningful. Variations already abound with substitutions for the really big number, the manner that the gibberish is produced and what the final meaningful product is. I’d personally like to see a lot of whatevers reproduce Fred Saberhagen, but that’s just me.
The math of the “Ain’t gonna happen” part is relying on a perfectly reasonable assumption that there’s a finite number of atoms, ergo impossible to have more monkeys than atoms.
Someone, probably inspired by the Simpsons episode and/or a drunken bar argument decided to code up a program to produce random gibberish and track the results.
And the article is written with the amazement of a toddler at Christmas, finding out that indeed some positive results have already been achieved. And some more are close. Which is because the programmer did what every good gematriac does.
He cheated.
Reproduction of individual words is conflated to meaningful reproduction without concern for the order.
What we’re really dealing with here is a sort of reverse Ramsey Theory analysis.
Whenever someone claims to have found a meaningful connection that was driven by pattern recognition gone wrong, Ramsey Theory can step in and prove that mathematically some pattern MUST exist if the structure being analyzed is big enough. It’s just a question of whether you prefer Saberhagen, Shakespeare, See Spot Run, or the digits of Pi as your meaningful work.
Now I’m all for maintaining the cosmic balance in things. For instance the Taylor Swift news and related conspiracies. The average gematria user is slow witted. She is Swift. The cosmic balance is maintained. Maybe the “Ain’t gonna happen” is wrong and infinite monkeys reproduced Shakespeare’s entire works and that’s what caused the Big Bang in the first place. A little cosmic balance being maintained can’t hurt for avoiding another one which would cause all kinds of delays on my daily commute. But gematria goes a bit too far.
The database to work with is as big as can be reasonably stretched to work with. Mathematically partitioning down daily bad stories in the news into two and three digit gematria numbers is mind numbingly easy. As soon as a number that isn’t desired it’s ignored. Just like the monkey gibberish it’s out of order, never appearing in a logical and truly connected way. The idea of what constitutes meaningful content instead of gibberish has never been determined among gematria users.
Leaving them with their sole usefulness in their lives. Producing massive amounts of gibberish to offset the structured and meaningful content out there. If we didn’t have gibberish to compare to we wouldn’t appreciate the genius of meaningful content. Cosmic balance maintained, second Big Bang avoided.
<whew>
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