this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
550 points (92.7% liked)

Technology

59429 readers
3110 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
550
Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds (phys.org)
submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
198 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 25 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn't become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

I get annoyed when websites say something like, ´Using a password of this strength will take a a hacker one million years to brute force.´

No, it’ll take a million years to try every combination and permutation of allowed characters. Chances are your password will be tried much sooner than that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

When they say such things, the are probably talking about the expected value, where those chances are taken into account, just like the number calculated in this article.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime.

That sounds a little low to me. B and N are right next to each other, so I'd expect them to mash left and right among similar keys a lot of the time. Then again, I think we're expecting some randomness here, not an actual chimp at a typewriter, but that's probably more likely to reproduce longer works than an actual chimp.