If you have an infinite amount of monkeys and they're all typing truly randomly, then an infinite number of them would get it correct on the first try. Which is sort of weird to think about lol.
Most people don't get the thought experiment at all.
I've seen 300+ deep comment chains on reddit with people arguing bitterly back and forth if a monkey could even operate a typewriter, and how it's absolutely impossible to get monkeys to type out a book, etc, etc, etc.
I think too many people don't consider the monkey is not supposed to be making decisions, it's just supposed to be inputting anything, literally anything, on a typewriter.
Like a random value generator, for typewriter keys.
I'm starting a 2nd order monkey typing business attempting to use a bigger infinity of monkeys to eventually recreate the works of the first set of infinite monkeys.
Since monkeys tend to hit the same keys repeatedly, rather than trying them all out at random, I'd say your second order monkey business is actually more likely to succeed than the first set of monkeys ever typing out Shakespeare is.
Perhaps it's in the monkey's psychology that they'd never hit the keys that much before just destroying it all. They're a pretty poor pick for a random value generator.
Not necessarily. There are an infinite number of positive numbers, but -13 will never be one of them. Ergo, even with infinite possibilities, you still may not see a particular combination (even if it does fit the criteria; my metaphor is imperfect).
As an IT guy, there will always be a special place in my heart for the awesome person who wrote a protocol suite for this use case (it is a lot of fun to read):
There are quite a few April Fool RFCs, but this one is definitely one of my favourites. This one and RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.
The defeater is each key needs to be statistically as likely as any other key to be pressed next, i.e. statistically independent events. For example after a monkey pressed S they are then just as likely to press K as W. If there is any reason they prefer a key or sequence you don't get a normal distribution and they probably will never create any of Shakespeare's works.
haha no, if you have a magic infinite sized room with an infinite number of magic, immortal monkeys, with an infinite number of typewriters with infinite paper and ink, you don't even need to park the monkeys in front the fucking keyboard, you will instantaneously have all the works of Shakespeare and every other book ever published and every book never published, and probably an infinite number of volumes of books that reveal every secret of the universe. (The hard part will be finding them.)
Instantly.
Just by having the means for anything random to happen to those keyboards on an infinite scale. The thought experiment isn't designed to make you believe that anything is possible as much as it's designed to show you the absurdity of infinity as a concept.
What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?