Larry Johnston:
> Then it goes on to make guesses about the second letter. Soon it
> hits upon the
>letter e, and writes it down and goes on to the third letter. Before
>long it has
>reproduced the entire message "Methinks it looks like a weasel". Since
>the target
>message has 32 letters, and the alphabet 26 letters, it only takes the
>computer 26 x
>32, or 832 guesses to come up with the entire message.
> But if each attempt by the computer is a guess at the entire
> sentence (which is
>much more like the biological problem) it takes 26 raised to the 32 power
>(26^32)
>guesses to come up with the target sentence. this is about 10^45 guesses, one
>followed by 45 zeros.
This depends on which part of "the biological problem" you are referring
to. Most biological problems since the beginning of life involve
inheritance, which means it is Markovian in that each successive generation
is a modification of the previous one, NOT a completely new stab at the
entire sentence.
Doug
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