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!
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.
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.
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
You assume that monkeys are identical, communicate with each other and know what they are doing. Take one of these away and all of the infinite monkeys will press the same buttons basically making them one monkey. Take another and they will type random gibberish.
The point of the dilemma is for non of those to be the case. The point is can Shakespeare or anything valuable to humans appear in random given enough time and resources? Basically can "the AI" as we know it now that doesn't actually have "I" create something new and valuable?
And the answer is(going from the basic maths) yes it may produce something cool but it also may never produce Shakespeare or anything cool and will never know what it can do and what it can't.
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-1/12 monkeys
True nathematician would never make a mistake distinguishing finite and infinite cardinality. Countability, on the other hand.. (but that's a separate issue)
It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
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.
Alas, not on a typewriter... Back to the drawing board!
No, the FIRST monkey to write Shakespeare used a feather and ink.
It only took a couple hundred years after all those millions for them to be written on the typewriter.
Turns out not quite. In the monkey version Hamlet says, "To be, or what."
A property of hydrogen is that, given enough hydrogen and time, eventually it will write out the full works of Shakespeare.
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.
if it's infinite monkeys then an infinite amount of them do it correct on the first try
Not necessarily. Each monkey is independent, right? So if we think about the first letter, it's either going to be, idk, A, the correct letter, or B, any wrong letter. Any monkey that types B is never going to get there. Now each money independently chooses between them. With each second monkey, the chances in aggregate get smaller and smaller than we only see B, but... It's never a 0 chance that the monkey hits B. If there's only two keys, it's always 50/50. And it could through freak chance turn out that they all hit B... Forever. There is never a guarantee that you will get even a single correct letter... Even with infinite monkeys.
I get that it seems like infinity has to include every possible outcome, because the limit of P(at least one monkey typing A) as the number of monkeys goes to infinity is 1... But a limit is not a value. The probability never reaches 1 even with infinite monkeys.
That's assuming they're typing truly randomly. Which is a fair assumption.
If the monkeys were truly infinite would time even matter? For any set of monkeys that could write Hamlet within a year there's an infinite number of duplicate sets, so they could do as much writing in one day as the original set would do over the age of the universe.
Considering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren't Hamlet? I'm honestly not fully convinced that you'd necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.
There are an infinite number of values between 1 and 2, but none of them are 3.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
You stupid monkey!
Damn. So close
Good glad to hear monkeys will produce their own unique literature instead of copying the classics.
Huh. I'd never thought of it like that, but now that you mention it with an infinite number of monkeys one of them will eventually write an entire literary canon of plays that blow that loser Shakespeare out of the water.
That research is worst type of reddit ACKCHYUALLY taken to academia
I fear the plague of reddit brainrot will soon make even research papers plain insufferable. Would you want to have moderator of 11 subreddits and holder of top 1% commenters achievement in your research group?
Something weird I've been noticing. Lately I've been unintentionally minimizing comments before I've finished reading them. Just happened with yours. It's like some subconscious part of my brain goes "booorrring!" half way through reading anything longer than two sentences and immediately goes for the next dopamine kick.
And I'm not knocking your comment. I was genuinely interested in what I was reading. It's just a little troubling. I dropped Reddit and Lemmy a while back because I felt like I was becoming addicted. I lasted a few months, but evidently I've fallen off the wagon.
Don’t worry I actually nurture my internet presence to be a little controversial and edgy. Not for every taste but those who enjoy we instantly are friends. It’s a filter of sorts. I want ppl who feel offended about such things to block me
Actually, we should be thankful for their divine presence.
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.
infinite monkey theorem relies on the assumption that infinite banana theorem is valid
Just thinking at a high level, an infinite number of monkies should hypothetically almost instantly produce Shakespeare (or at least as quickly as they can type)
Conversely, 1 monkey would eventually produce it given infinity time.
1 monkey would likely die before producing Shakespeare
oh absolutely, this is purely a thought experiment of course.
not if it’s an infinite monkey
Well, an infinite amount would.
One monkey may never produce it even given infinite time. It could just produce an infinite string of the letter a and never change it's mind. That's less likely that it writing hamlet, or even many hamlets... But nonetheless, it could. In fact all of the infinite monkeys could do that. If you repeated the experiment and infinite number of times, it's likely that one of them will simple produce an infinite number of infinite strings of only the letter A. Or, idk, ASCII art.
Back in my IT support days, IPX routing had a "Count to Infinity" problem when the number of hops between sites went above 15. We used to joke that this made 16 "Infinity".
Being nerds at the time, we did napkin math to prove the Shakespearian Monkey Quotient was 256cmy (combined monkey years) for "Hamlet".
Combined Monkey Years just aren't the same since their lead singer left, I'm hoping they improve eventually.
Don't worry, the reunion tour is in 35cmy
Still stuck on step 1. Get infinite monkeys.
We're gonna need a bigger sedan...
But monkeys never ask questions.
Science has yet to determine if monkeys would be able to type "wherefore art thou Romeo?"
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
Nah, internet commenters are definitely crows.
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.
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.
infinite - infinite = infinite, take that infinite
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
‘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!
Here's a documentary about the monkeys: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkLeto3RZrk
🤣
This is the researcher
