A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
As I pointed out elsewhere about this: it also is based entirely on probability, like cracking encryption. It could take longer than the universe will be around. But there's also the possibility they write Hamlet within a year because they got lucky.
This thread could well have been written by an infinite amount of monkeys, too.
Thoiei0z ao;qjlk a 2897n3 eiie??! hoenwk a ;jihiwe a wiiien theohg rosebud oiwoi;qne i93823hnn banana
infinite - infinite = infinite, take that infinite
It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
Turns out not quite. In the monkey version Hamlet says, "To be, or what."
This is always how I've chosen to interpret the expression. It's not a theory. It's an observation.
It's a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it's truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.
The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.
If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.
It can be taken in other directions too. It's a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.
Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.
Did you choose to overlook my intentional usage of the word "chosen" just to mansplain something obvious? I did not make my choice out of ignorance, but I appreciate you assuming I did.
Also since it should happen once, that means that it also happens an infinite number of times, but a smaller infinity than the whole infinity.
Good glad to hear monkeys will produce their own unique literature instead of copying the classics.
But given infinite time, could OP spell "infinity" correctly?
Well if you give them infintiny time... maybe.
infintiny? you bloopid monkye
Infynyty?
Next question, would Shakespeare appear in the Library of Babel?
Yes, everything that can be expressed as letters is in the Library of Babel. Finding anything meaningful in that library, though, is gonna take longer than just writing it yourself.
The entire thing is utterly ridiculous. The meme is infinite monkeys.
The mathematician said, "But what if it was 200k monkeys?"
Reporters claim mathematician proved infinite monkeys meme is wrong.
200,000 does not equal infinite!
-1/12 monkeys
The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of "infinite monkeys". An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it'll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don't even need the infinite time.
It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.
And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There's no infinite time.
A more interesting calculation the mathematician should have done is how many monkeys are needed to write Shakespeare in the lifespan of the universe rather than starting with 200k.
The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of "infinite monkeys".
If thats the point where you want to draw the line, I guess that it becomes dumb at exactly that point.
But the point of the thought experiment is that it says what you said: it will definitelly happen because infinity is absurdly big number.
If you follow it, you quickly end up with the Infinite Improbability Drive from The Hitchhikers Guide - if you have an infinite number of typewriters, an infinite number of them will be loaded with paper that already has the complete works of Shakespeare written on it
Saying that last bit about time is not particularly meaningful for two reasons.
First of all, we do not especially know the end state of the universe. It may not be true that all matter decays, and protons may be stable. We may be in a false vacuum which will spontaneously collapse in large timespans.
Second of all, the hypothetical is a thought experiment. The monkeys are a placeholder for any random generation of characters. The thought experiment also does not take into consideration the food required to feed monkeys for infinite time, nor their aging, mutation over generations, and waste logistics. It's not meaningful then to suddenly decide to apply the laws of physics to them. The only laws applicable in this scenario are logic and mathematics.
I generally agree with the rest of your take, although I disagree where you say the thought experiment is dumb. I only have an issue with that last point lol. Cheers.
Them saying that is like me saying Bizmuth isn't radioactive because it's half-life is many, many times longer than even the most conservative estimates for the heat-death of the universe.
In finite time that's effectively true, because the universe itself would decay before a block of bizmuth lost any significant weight - but it isn't physically true, because with infinite time a block of bizmuth left completely alone would evaporate away via alpha decay.
And that's the point of infinite time - to let you throw away time and probabilities as obstacles and strictly focus on whether something could physically happen, rather than the odds of it occurring.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
Damn. So close
You stupid monkey!
‘If infinite monkeys type everyday they might accidentally write Hamlet the play. But they’ll probably just shit on it and throw it away; in the infinite monkey cage!
Hell, an actually infinite amount of monkeys would produce the complete works of Shakespeare plus some originals in the same style in the exact amount of time it took to literally press the necessary buttons.
An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).
If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.
Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.
I mean, even if the typewriter had an extra button setting off a bomb, killing the monkey and all the monkeys around them, they'd still pull it off. That's infinity baby.
The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
A good read.
I once heard that monkeys will just go to the typewriter, tipe the same letter a few times and leave. Doesn't sound like Shakespeare to me
Ð ſtu̇dı ƿėz t ſı ƿėt tuımfreım Shakespeare kᵫd huıpėþetikėlı imṙdj ovṙ. Ð rizu̇ltſ ſu̇djeſt ðæt enı givin mu̇nkı ƿᵫd nıd ė greıtṙ ėmaunt v tuım ðæn ðeıṙ ƿᵫd bı u̇ntil hıt deþ t prėduſ ıvin ė rekėgnuızėbėl ėmaunt v Shakespeare.
spoiler
The study was to see what timeframe shakespeare could hypothetical emerge over. The results suggest that any given monkey would need a greater amount of time than there would be until heat death to produce ecen a recognizeable amount of Shakespeare.
Bro. I like the idea of introducing non-latin characters into the English alphabet, but holy shit that's basically unreadable lmao.
English is long overdue for a spelling reform, but just taking all fancy looking characters from other germanic languages is not the way
I welcome the visual once BBC realises the limit as k goes from 0 to pos infinity, of sum n=0 to k, for (1 / (1 + n)) actually converges and has a real solution.
And the study was even proven wrong in the 17th century. A finite amount of monkeys already produced Shakespeare in a finite amount of time; it took roughly 55 million years.
Source: Primates show up in the fossil records, dating to roughly 55mill years. And Shakespeare's complete works were most likely completed by William Shakespeare, a famous decendant of said primates.
Primates ≠ monkeys
If baboons and macaques are monkeys, and if howlermonkeys and spidermonkeys are monkeys, humans MUST be monkeys.
Because they can ONLY both be monkeys if their common ancestor was also a monkey and we share that very same common ancestor. In fact we are closer related to macaques and baboons than to spidermonkeys, which means we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than both us and the other old world monkeys share with the new world monkeys.
Cladistically, you can not outgrow your ancestry.
Humans are apes, apes are a subgroup of monkeys, monkeys are a subgroub of primates.
If you go back far enough they do.
🤣