Drawing on the insights of the Wistar conferees, Denton explained the mathematical reason for this. In English there are vastly more ways “to go wrong than to go right”—that is, for any sequence of any given length, there are more combinations of English letters that will not produce a meaningful phrase or sentence than combinations of those same 26 letters that will generate a meaningful sentence. Indeed, the number of nonfunctional gibberish sequences dwarfs the number of functional combinations. Consequently, random changes in letters are overwhelmingly more likely to “find the gibberish,”
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