ok, here's a friday afternoon brainteaser for you all. Not the kind of thing I would normally post on here but bugger it I felt like it...
First I'm interested to get your initial thought of what the answer might be, then if you want to look more into into it, perhaps you can tell me what you think the actual answer is.
Background: I was thinking about whether it would be possible to copyright every possibly piece of text (in english) up to a certain length, and therefor be able to prevent anybody else from being able to write something that did not infringe your copyright.
Make some assumptions - only letters [a-z] and <space> are allowed. any combination of these is valid (i.e. not just those which make real words). So we have 27 possible characters in our alphabet.
Each character is going to be represented by a byte.
A DVD can store 4.7x10^9 bytes
How long a piece of text can you enumerate every single possibility of using this 27 character alphabet, and fit the results onto one DVD?
Remember, first your instinctive answer, then a more thought out one if you care to spend the time.
There's a follow-on question if you do well at this one!
First I'm interested to get your initial thought of what the answer might be, then if you want to look more into into it, perhaps you can tell me what you think the actual answer is.
Background: I was thinking about whether it would be possible to copyright every possibly piece of text (in english) up to a certain length, and therefor be able to prevent anybody else from being able to write something that did not infringe your copyright.
Make some assumptions - only letters [a-z] and <space> are allowed. any combination of these is valid (i.e. not just those which make real words). So we have 27 possible characters in our alphabet.
Each character is going to be represented by a byte.
A DVD can store 4.7x10^9 bytes
How long a piece of text can you enumerate every single possibility of using this 27 character alphabet, and fit the results onto one DVD?
Remember, first your instinctive answer, then a more thought out one if you care to spend the time.
There's a follow-on question if you do well at this one!