lew@ihuxr.UUCP (Lew Mammel, Jr.) (05/09/84)
My article entitled "being" is the output of a random walk program on an hp2621 screen. The walk starts at the center of the screen memory and goes until it hits an edge. The numbers and letters indicate how many times a given position was visited. The letters are extended digits. I wrote my program so that it would accept arbitrary strings as srand() seeds by formally interpreting them as decimal digit strings. I decided that it was a "karmagram" generator, and that the shape would give a clue to ones personality by entering ones name or other tokens as seeds. A friend of mine suggested giving "0" as the seed, and the result, to our delighted amazement, was that it spelled BEING in the middle of the screen. Of course, the manner in which this is accomplished is a sight to behold. I then decided that this was proof that zero has Buddha-nature, based on the string manipulation discussions of the Tortoise in Hofstatder's GEB. In fact I sent a note to Hofsdadter c/o SciAm describing it and he sent an acknowledgment, asking "What next?" I'm putting this in net.origins because of the monkey-typewriter business as a case in point illustrating the difficulties of ex post facto evaluations of probabilities. Lew Mammel, Jr. ihnp4!ihuxr!lew
hardie@uf-csg.UUCP (Peter T Hardie [stdnt]) (11/02/84)
this is a comment on the last line of that article. I agree that ex post facto arguments are pointless. Also, the continual use of probability in anti-evolution arguments fails to take into account both the time over which the "primordial soup" was in existence and being bombarded by energy, and the total planetary population of the Universe over which the same conditions apply. Any references to this article please use "Ex post facto" as a tag. -- Pete Hardie, Univ. of Florida, CIS Gould username: hardie