Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
Mar 2019
why the occurrence of something highly improbable should be inherently noteworthy


                            


Here is a way to produce                          Here is a way to produce
an outcome                                                  a poem
almost certainly                                          almost certainly
never seen before in                                   never seen before in
human history                                             human history
and never to be repeated:                          and never to be repeated:

Shuffle a deck of cards.                             Shuffle an alphabet.
The resulting deck, assuming                  The resulting deck of letters
the cards are shuffled correctly,        if the letters are shuffled correctly
should only occur on average                should only occur on average
every 52 51 *50 *... *21 shuffles,       every 26 25 *24 *... *21 shuffles,
because this is the number                        because this is the number
of possible permutations of                       of possible permutations
52 cards, all equally likely.                         26 letters, all equally likely.

 This number is incomprehensibly large, on the order of 1068 or 534 using  letters

                               100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,     000,000,000,000,
(or half that with an alphabet)


                                                Every­ person on earth could
                                       write a gibberish poem once every nanosecond
                    for the expected lifetime of the universe and not even put
                                                      a dent in that number.

                               Is this why then is there not a GOOD poem written
                                          every time letters are shuffled about
                                             the astronomically unlikely event
                                                         that just took place?

Because letters are not numbers, the subset of sequenced associations called **words
  (in the English language) is about a mere
                                                  ~ 220,000~
                    But, each year, an estimated 800 to 1,000 new words
                                    are added to the English language


That is still a heck of a lot of possible combinations and is the reason                                          why the occurrence of something should be inherently noteworthy
at all.

So writing a new combination of words is still pretty difficult,
and writing an intelligible and intelligent
mind moving combination
is a rare thing indeed.

Should you happen to write a poem and get even a single read, that is a pretty miraculous thing because the subset of the billions of English reading persons on Earth who also read poetry habitutualy
read is the square root of pi, or 1.7724537398758821888.

which ain’t a lot of people.

So, if you wrote a really good poem today and a couple of people read it, liked it, that highly improbable event is highly improbable, about the same chance that someone else exists with your exact DNA (excluding any identical twin) is a reallly low number

so, consider yourself really, really special.  I do.
Smoke Scribe
Written by
Smoke Scribe
723
   susurri
Please log in to view and add comments on poems