[beltsazar]

> Again I think you are confused. Assuming random distribution, 'We Are Coming' is just as likely as any other similarly long structure to form.

You are confused. How could we be back to square one? We've discussed it before. I'm not arguing that "WE ARE COMING" is more likely than, for example, "WE RAE COMING". Of course, they are as likely.

Suppose you have a machine that generates 15-char strings. Yes, "INTERCHANGEABLE" is as likely as "YSVQEPQVIGXOQSR" to come out—but that’s not the point. My point is that the probability of getting a proper English word is very unlikely. Most of the time, you'll get gibberish strings.

Also, I didn't say the sentence to be encoded in morse code. Instead, the galaxies form the literal shape of "W", "E", and so on. I hope you can see that in this case, it's borderline impossible to happen.

[unusualmonkey]

> My point is that the probability of getting a proper English word is very unlikely. Most of the time, you'll get gibberish strings.

Sure, but given a large enough sample both will likely exist. So the fact that one happens to be english should not surprise anyone nor does it suggest meaning.

> Also, I didn't say the sentence to be encoded in morse code. Instead, the galaxies form the literal shape of "W", "E", and so on. I hope you can see that in this case, it's borderline impossible to happen.

I used morse as its easy to reason about. There's no reason to think shapes are impossible - you just have to define what makes a shape and then look for patterns that match.

Humans have been finding patterns in clouds, stars and even toast since time immemorial.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/30505

[NemoNobody]

You just don't understand probability, possibility and potential very well. Yes, you can get hung up where you are and we can argue semantics - the fact is that if I throw 1000 dice and get 1000 "1"s that is not the same as my being able to theoretically do that an equal % chance each throw.

The ring may be possible but, so far, it's the only example so despite being a potential random outcome of randomness, the sheer singularity of its existence proves it's incredibly low likelihood of occurrence - perhaps such a low % chance of actually occurring that it may be easier to believe that the ring had help in its formation, whatever that may be.

I'm not going to deny obvious things just bc they challenge my worldview - especially if I have to defend my viewpoint semantically

[beltsazar]

> Sure, but given a large enough sample both will likely exist.

This applies to every event with nonzero probabilities. What's your point?

> Humans have been finding patterns in clouds, stars and even toast since time immemorial.

I knew this—humans love finding patterns. But our discussion is not about that. It's about the very basic thing in probabilities, which is some event is not as likely to happen as others. This is so trivially true.

The probability of getting a proper English word from a random string generator is much less likely than the probability of not getting it. Thus, getting a proper English word should be surprising. It is as surprising as getting any string from a set of gibberish strings with the same cardinality of English vocabularies.

> So the fact that one happens to be english should not surprise anyone

What should surprise you, then? I'm surprised that we need to talk about this very basic thing three times.