The American Spectator

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br> is complex in a certain sense, because that exact pattern is highly unlikely to be produced by chance. If my computer keyboard could type only capital letters and the space character, there would be 27 characters that could go in any “slot” of the sequence. The total number of unique sequences of characters that could be produced would be 27 multiplied by itself 22 times, or 27 to the 22nd power. That is a very large number. Expressed in powers of 10, it is more than 10 to the 31st power (10^31); that is, 10 with another 30 zeros behind it. To give an idea of the size of that number, fewer than 10^18 seconds have elapsed since the universe began about 20 billion years ago. If we wrote a program to run on a supercomputer that would generate random strings 22 characters long, and our supercomputer could run through a trillion tries every second, the odds would still be against producing this exact sequence by chance in 20 billion years. The fact that it’s very improbable to produce this precise sequence by chance is another way of saying, in information theory, that it is highly complex . p>The third criterion is specification. Here’s another 22-character sequence: br> /p>

THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR

br> When we see this sequence, we conclude without a moment’s hesitation that it has been produced by a fine intelligence. Like the gibberish sequence of the same length, it is complex because it would take more than those trillion tries a second over the history of the universe to produce it by chance. It is also specified in relation to a pre-existing standard or function; in this case, the rules, spelling, and vocabulary of the English language.