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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Saeviomagy" data-source="post: 891905" data-attributes="member: 5890">That's because it's random and not design. One of the fundamental parts of the concept 'design' is that it has to have some forethought. Arguing that design isn't random or vice versa is bordering on the nonsensical.As for the casino - the likelyhood (not fact, not certainty - likelyhood) that you will never see one is beause it's an extremely complex pattern. It requires the simultaeneous occurrence of a very large number of random factors. The likelyhood of a pink elephant manifesting in the air next to you is the same as the likelyhood of a particular formation of any other type of particle, regardless of concepts such as order or design.Lets think up an example that might get something across to you.Toss a coin. Keep tossing it. At some point, assuming you're not cheating, you will get a run of either heads or tails. You will get lots of heads or tails in a row.Now. Roll a die. At some point, you will get lots of a certain number in a row.Now roll a 26-sided die. At some point, you will get lots of a certain letter. Keep rolling long enough, and you'll be able to take a subset of your rolling which WILL have the distribution of letters required for human language.It's a phenomenon called 'clumping'. Any real random number generator will do it, because  a pattern with a predominance of a certain outcome is just as likely as a pattern with a predominance of some other outcome, or a pattern with no dominant result.Any statistician who feels comfortable with using the exact words "will never happen in this universe" with no qualifiers is someone who doesn't understand the most basic elements of his own craft. "Will most likely never happen in this universe" is perfectly acceptable.In the coin flipping example, there is a 1/2 chance that the coin will come up heads. This doesn't by any chance mean that you need to flip it twice to have heads come up. Nor does it mean that flipping it twice will result in heads coming up. It just means that 1/2 flips will, over a sufficiently large sample, will be heads.That's why some event which is extremely unlikely can never be ruled out of happening. No matter what the odds, it COULD happen right now. It could never happen. It could happen 8 times in the next 6 seconds. We can assign probabilities to all these things, and we can label some as insignificant, not worth bothering about etc, but we can never label them as impossible.p.s. On my random character/phrase recognition program (aptly named "Monkey.java"), the phrase " This" took some 8317289 randomly generated characters (from a set of 91 possible characters) to produce. Statistically the combination should come up 1/6240321451 combinations of any given 5 characters from that set. Looks like I got lucky.I would run it on longer sentences, but I fear it would be a rather fruitless waste of my time. The chances of it finishing a 19 letter sentence within my lifetime are rather slim...</blockquote>

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