Ketan's Musings » philosophy http://ketan.padegaonkar.name Where he blogs about his eclipse musings Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:24:40 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 An infinite number of monkeys — and Software Engineers http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2007/01/17/an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-software-engineers.html http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2007/01/17/an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-software-engineers.html#comments Wed, 17 Jan 2007 11:21:06 +0000 Ketan http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2007/01/17/an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-software-engineers.html 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).

]]> http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2007/01/17/an-infinite-number-of-monkeys-and-software-engineers.html/feed 0 The Matrix — The big daddy for all the inspiration http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2006/01/16/the-matrix-the-big-daddy-for-all-the-inspiratio.html http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2006/01/16/the-matrix-the-big-daddy-for-all-the-inspiratio.html#comments Sun, 15 Jan 2006 23:58:00 +0000 Ketan http://ketan.padegaonkar.name/2006/01/16/the-matrix-the-big-daddy-for-all-the-inspiratio.html After a lot of real exhausting thinking work for a week. It was time to gather up some inspiration to continue at the same pace. What better way than to watch The Matrix.

This conversation really ringed the bells in me.

Neo: Tell me how I stopped 4 sentinels by thinking it…
Oracle: The power of the One extends beyond this world. It reaches from here all the way back to where it came from — The Source.

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