An infinite number of monkeys — and Software Engineers
A discussion with Nirav reminded me of “The Infinite Monkey Theorem,” which states that:
a monkey typing at random on a typewriter keyboard, will “almost surely” type out the complete works of William Shakespeare
We were discussing the notion of a typical Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) in a typical CMMI Level 5 approved company. There are an almost infinite[1] number of software developers, “almost surely” one of them is going to come up with working software, as against mortals using Continuous Integration on a dollar-a-day, refactoring, to ensure that the software just works, every time, and (hopefully) all the time.
Footnotes
[1] “almost infinite” in this context refers to “a lot”, since a few “million” is much closer to infinity than say a few “hundred”, we consider a few “million” to be “almost (equal to) infinity”
Resources
@see Proof of the Infinite Monkey Theorem.
@see RFC2795 — The Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite (IMPS).