Everyone's heard the theory that with enough chimpanzees, typewriters and time, you'd eventually produce "Hamlet."Shakespeare it's not, but California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger's office today released a letter to the California State Assembly vetoing Assembly Bill 1176. A number of commentators have noticed a sub-textual message composed by the first letter of each line. The governor's office has called it "unintentional" and a "weird coincidence."
How weird? What are the odds that seven lines of a note could just happen to spell out this particular message? Would you believe less than one in 2.7 billion?
The math is surprisingly simple. Assume that each of the seven important lines of the letter have to start with a word (no hyphenation) that itself begins with a specific letter. The odds of randomly coming up with the Governor's message is then the product of the odds of each of the seven letters occurring as the first letter of all the words in the English language.
Surprisingly, a quick scan of the web didn't uncover a complete list of beginning-of-word letter frequency for English (how 'bout some help here, Google?) but I did find this top ten list.
| Letter | Frequency |
|---|---|
| T | 0.1594 |
| A | 0.1550 |
| I | 0.0823 |
| S | 0.0775 |
| O | 0.0712 |
| C | 0.0597 |
| M | 0.0426 |
| F | 0.0408 |
| P | 0.0400 |
| W | 0.0382 |
Source: Top 10 Beginning of Word Letters
So here's the math (using < 0.0382 for "u", "k" and "y" which don't make the top ten.
f = .0408 x
u < .0382 x
c = .0597 x
k < .0382 x
y < .0382 x
o = .0712 x
u < .0382
<= 3.693 x 10^(-10) or approximately one in 2.7 billion.
Some coincidence... the governor may have some especially talented chimps on his staff.
love it!
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