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Author
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Topic: Answering: The advantages of theft over toil
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Jim Skipper
Member
Member # 1510
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posted 02. March 2005 17:12
One of the other may have addressed this; if so I apologize for hitting it again.
Jerry wrote:
quote:
Because the stark reality of you doing this is impossible. If you could somehow supernaturally flip a coin once a second, there still are only 4.6 x 10^17 seconds in the universe since the big bang.
You really underestimate the volume of chemical reactions on the planet. Reality is more like if you got everyone on the planet to flip a coin each second. It should be pretty obvious that if you have 7 billion people flipping a coin every second, you are going to get much faster results than if just one person is flipping a coin every second.
Imagine then Evan's very insightful Yatze analogy. Imagine 7 billion people playing Yatze at the same time. You are going to have every possible Yatze combination occur an incredibly large number of times.
And 7 billion is a tiny fraction of the chemical reactions going on on our planet every second.
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Jerry D. Bauer
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Member # 756
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posted 04. March 2005 17:56
*******You really underestimate the volume of chemical reactions on the planet. Reality is more like if you got everyone on the planet to flip a coin each second. It should be pretty obvious that if you have 7 billion people flipping a coin every second, you are going to get much faster results than if just one person is flipping a coin every second.
Imagine then Evan's very insightful Yatze analogy. Imagine 7 billion people playing Yatze at the same time. You are going to have every possible Yatze combination occur an incredibly large number of times.
And 7 billion is a tiny fraction of the chemical reactions going on our planet every second. ******
Hello, Jim. Don't reckon we've ever run across each other before real name to real name, anyhow. ![[Wink]](wink.gif)
Evan's observation is a clear case of intelligent design at work. For example, flipping 500 coins and having them all come up heads works out to log2(2^500) = 500 bits of information and this is simply impossible to achieve because there is not enough time since the big bang to do this.
But intelligent design can easily do this. I will flip the coins, intelligently decide to leave the heads and re-flip only the tails. This will take only a few flips until I have all heads.
This is the same concept as in the Yatze analogy. Intelligence + work = intelligent design. And I am firmly convinced this is the way life was designed.
But let’s look at your addition to the analogy mathematically, and see what “7 billion people playing Yatze at the same time” could accomplish from the aspect of our coins (I don‘t play Yatze and wouldn‘t know the first thing about it). In fact, let’s take it all the way and just calculate what all of nature could accomplish and then we will know.
We can determine an actual upper probability bound based on the reality of nature. Let's allow every particle that comprises the matter of the universe to help you in flipping 500 coins per seconds and see how many bits could be generated since the big bang. There are estimated to be 10^80 particles in the observable universe:
10^80 flips / 1 second x 4.73 x 10^17 seconds = 4.73 x 10^97 flips.
We're still nowhere close to the 500 bits of information needed for Complex Specified Information, the type of information found in a living cell to form. In fact, the maximum amount of information that could possibly have been manufactured by nature given all the time since the big bang works out to be H (bits) = log2(4.73 x 10^97) = 325 bits.
I think that 325 bits is the actual UPB, but Dembski went back before the big bang and we KNOW his 500 bits ain’t gonna happen. That seems the standard UPB in ID and I agree it should be.
Do you understand how many thousands of bits of information the simplest living cell contains, or would you like me to calculate this for you as well? Not a problem, just ask.
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Jim Skipper
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Member # 1510
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posted 08. March 2005 20:46
325 bits? I am a computer programer so maybe bits means something different to me than it does to you. What do YOU mean when you say "bits?"
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Jim Skipper
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Member # 1510
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posted 12. March 2005 16:25
No, really, tell me what you mean by 325 bits. Because each coin represents a bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, which equates to heads or tails. Therefore 4.73 x 10^97 flips is 4.73 x 10^97 bits. That is a LOT of information.
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Jerry D. Bauer
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Member # 756
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posted 14. March 2005 19:47
*****No, really, tell me what you mean by 325 bits. Because each coin represents a bit. A bit is a 1 or 0, which equates to heads or tails. Therefore 4.73 x 10^97 flips is 4.73 x 10^97 bits. That is a LOT of information.*****
Hey, Jim:
First understand the type of information we are working with: "A numerical measure of the uncertainty of an experimental outcome."
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=information
Bits are normally mathematically expressed as H.
"A bit (abbreviated b) is the most basic information unit used in computing and information theory. A single bit is a one or a zero, a true or a false, a "flag" which is "on" or "off", or for that matter any two mutually exclusive states.
Claude E. Shannon first used the word bit in a 1948 paper. Shannon's bit is a portmanteau word for binary digit (or possibly binary digit). He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit
You're right. Those 500 coins represent 1 for the heads we were calculating and 0 for non-heads.
Shannon calculated bits:
But it is generally regarded that Shannon's formula can reduce down (and more often is, than is not) to H = log2W. That was the one we were using.
W is the statistical weight which I calculated as 2 possible microstates of the matter (heads or tails) to the power of the total number of pieces, or 2^500.
But really, 325 bits of information is not that much information as I can randomly generate 325 bits of numbers in just a few seconds.
The deal is that nature is not in the information producing business. Only intelligence is.
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