The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
The theorem holds true. The theorem states that the monkey has infinite time, not just the lifetime of our universe.
That’s just lazy science to change the conditions to make sensational headlines. Bad scientists!
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.
The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.
It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.
How are they defining the end of the universe?
The universe is believed to end just a few nanoseconds before a monkey finishes writing Hamlet.
Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years
We know such an infinitesimally small amount about what is actually happening in the universe that any claims to be capable of predicting it’s end are patently absurd.
That’s not bold, we’ve known how long the universe will last for decades now.
Just because someone tells you something, doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re talking about. fyi
When multiple fields of science all agree, yeah they know what they’re talking about.
I just don’t get these anti-science types…
Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and that means we never would have.
Why must the concept of time before the big bang (or after our heat death) exist in our physical reality for us to speculate about theoretical infinities past those? The thought experiment is about infinite time, not all the time in our limited universe. A lot of things happen at infinity that break down as soon as you add a limit, but we’re not talking limits when we’re talking infinity.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??
You stupid monkey!
So, while the Infinite Monkey Theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.
Is it though? The Monkey Theorem should make it understandable how long infinity really is. That the lifetime of the universe is not long enough is nothing unexpected IMHO, infinity is much (infinitely) longer. And that’s what the theorem is about, isn’t it?!
This is clownery, humanity is infinite monkeys, and we wrote Hamlet ages ago.
Are they arguing it wasn’t random though? I mean Shakespeare had to think through the plot and everything, not just scribble nonsense on a page
Everyone keeps forgetting that we’re all just what monkeys evolved into…
Yeah, that’s why we need at least… two of them.
the paper used the entire population (200 thousand) and would take some 10 ^ 10 ^ 7 heat deaths of the universe
Irrelevant. The heat death of the universe is a constraint unrelated to the premise of the original problem.
I don’t think it’s a constraint, it’s more like a measuring stick to try to show how ridiculously long that time is
It’s really not that long, if we can’t get monkeys to write Shakespeare.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Lifetime of the universe is infinitely less than infinite time. So they solved for the wrong problem. Of course it may take longer than the life of the universe, or it may happen in a year. That’s the whole point of the concepts of infinity and true randomness. Once you put a limit on time or a restriction on randomness, then the thought experiment is broken. You’ve totally changed the equation.
As such, we have to conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently provided the answer as to whether monkey labour could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavour as a source of scholarship or creativity. To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
But… we already did it?
Not with a typewriter, though.
I would place money on some enthusiast somewhere having typed up Hamlet on a typewriter just for kicks. Surely in the hundreds of years of overlap between humanity, Hamlet, and typewriters, it’s happened once. I’d be more concerned with typos.
The statement isn’t about “A” monkey. It’s about an infinite amount of monkeys.
Strong entry for an Ig Nobel Prize if nothing else.
How about 4 monkeys in parallel?
Switch to AMD. More monkeys.
Yes, and add an Agile framework. Extreme Monkey typing.
What about monkey AI to get ahead using lower paid monkeys?
That’s because they only considered one monkey.
You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.
But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔
An ape could though.
