The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
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
The thought experiment suggests that over a long enough period of time, every possible combination of letters would be typed out on a keyboard, including Hamlet.
They are not arguing about randomness, as it is inherent to the thought experiment. Randomness is necessary for the experiment to occur.
They are arguing that the universe would be dead before the time criteria is met. It is a bitter and sarcastic conclusion to the thought experiment, and is supposed to be funny.
In conversation, it would be delivered like this:
“You know, over a long enough period of time, monkeys smashing typewriters randomly would eventually produce Hamlet”
“The universe isn’t going to last that long.”
Nobody asked but I had to share this
It’s important to me that everyone understands the joke, even if that understanding robs them of the joy of it. “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. It kills it”.
But it’s important because I suffered a lot of being left out as a kid. Others found how good it felt to be exclusive, and shoulder me out of things, or refuse to explain things, or whatever it was that made me the outcast. I could tell from their faces that they love the way it felt when they did that to me. But it hurt me a lot.
I don’t want there to be any exclusivity anymore. Nobody deserves that pain. I want everyone to understand the joke, even if that prevents them from ever laughing at it.
Everyone keeps forgetting that we’re all just what monkeys evolved into…
Actually, both monkeys and us are what our common ancestors evolved into. Which was neither a human nor a monkey.
But we aren’t talking about one monkey. We are talking about infinite monkeys.
Infinity is already a loaded concept in our universe.
There’s still a chance that a monkey will type it on the first attempt. It’s just very small.
If I understand statistics correctly, it’s actually a 50/50 chance.
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.
Abiogenisis in shambles again
I’ve read there are so many permutations of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, that in all the times decks have been shuffled through history, there’s almost no chance any given arrangement has ever been repeated. If we could teach monkeys to shuffle cards I wonder how long it would take them to do it.
There are 8.0658*10^67 orders you can shuffle a card deck in.
The math is easy. It’s just 52! if your calculator has that function which is really 525150…32*1. There are 52 possibilities for the first card 51 for the second since you’ve already used one card and so on.
How many decks of cards have been shuffled over human history, or will be is beyond me.
For those who are confused, the comment meant to say
52*51*50*....*3*2*1i.e. 52 × 51 × 50 × … × 3 × 2 × 1
Markdown syntax screwed it up.
Oh I didn’t notice it did that. thanks for fixing it.
Yeah that’s the part that isn’t easy.
What if it’s a smart monkey?
Of our sample size, 100% of “smart” (capable of symbolic language) monkey species have already written Hamlet.
Fuuuuck there goes my plan to get this monkey to write Hamlet within the lifetime of the universe…
Maybe it’s becaue scientists have very poor imagination of the universe.
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?
Probably very shortly after dinner has been served at that restaurant.
I think that was just a galaxy, not the whole universe.
You mean the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Hmm… i sit corrected.
But what does the Lord think about this?
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…
the monkey has infinite time
Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?
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.
Infinite time is perfectly defined, it just doesn’t exist in our universe
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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.
I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.
How is the infinite monkey theorum “misleading”. It’s got “infinite” in the name. If you’re applying constraints based on the size or age of the universe, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the thought experiment.
Infinite monkeys would produce everything in the time that it would take to type it out as fast as anyone can type, infinite times. There would also be infinite variations of slower versions, including an infinite number of versions where everything but the final period is written, but it never gets added (same with every other permutation of missing characters and extra ones added).
There would be infinite monkeys that only type one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems, and infinite monkeys that type some number greater than that, and even infinite monkeys that type out plays Shakespeare wanted to write but never got around to, plus infinite fan fictions about one or more of his plays.
Like infinite variations of plays where Juliette kills Hamlet, Ceasar puts on a miraculous defense and then divides Europe into the modern countries it’s made up of today, Romeo falls in love with King Lear, and Transformers save the Thundercats from the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles who were brainwashed to think they were ancient normal samurai lizards. Some variations having all of that in the same play.
That’s the thing about infinity. If there’s any chance of something happening at all, it happens infinite times.
Even meta variants would all happen. Like if there’s any chance a group of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters could form a computer, there would be infinite variations of that computer in that infinite field of monkeys, including infinite ones that are trying to stimulate infinite monkeys making up a computer to verify that those monkeys make up a valid computer worth building and don’t have some bug where the temperature gets too high and melts some of the monkeys or the food delivery system isn’t fast enough to keep up and breaks down because monkeys get too tired to keep up with necessary timings.
BUT, even though all of these would exist in that infinite sea of monkeys, there would be far more monkeys just doing monkey things. So many more that you could spend your whole lifetime jumping to random locations within that sea of monkeys and never see any of the random organization popping out, despite an infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their whole existence to making sure you, specifically, can find them (they might be too busy fighting off the infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their lives to prevent you from ever finding non-noise in the sea of monkeys).
Yeah sure, they’ll probably also have typed all posts on Lemmy, including those that have not been posted yet.
If those monkeys existed there is an infinite chance you are right.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??
You stupid monkey!
I knew this would be a waste of time! *loads gun
I can’t remember the author or title, but that was the idea for a story I once read.
God sends an angel and the monkeys to do the job. They get close, but when the angel is doing the final read through he sees "…to be, or not to beee, Damn the ‘E’ key is sticking. " And they have to start over
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?!
Except the lifetime of the universe is quite small when compared to infinity, so it doesn’t really convey how large infinity is because it’s so much more.
They don’t convey the same information.
Infinity isn’t really an amount of something.
Yes I know, but I was just trying to put into the perspective the person I was replying to.
> typeof Infinity 'number'Riddle me that, smart guy.
Damn, you just SLAMMED me.
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
It could happen the very first time a monkey sat down at a typewriter. It’s just very unlikely.
from the wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theoremIf there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.
… the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.
But not zero.
Basically nothing is ever truly zero
Someone wiser than me already said that it already has happened: 1 ape did, in fact, write the complete works of Shakespeare.
ape != monkey
The probability of lots of things is zero. The probability of a monkey typing a Chinese character on an English keyboard is zero.
Similar idea: there are an infinite amount of numbers between zero and one, but none of those numbers is two.
I am.
Hello “Zero”!
Weird how neither of those numbers are infinities. Almost like the numbers used are unfathomably small in comparison.
So you’re telling me… there’s a chance!
Sorry, I’m sort of lampooning comments like the one above and below you where people just can’t resist focusing on the possibility, no matter how ridiculously remote it seems. For myself, there’s a point of “functionally zero odds” that I’m willing to accept and move on with my life.
so you’re saying there’s a chance…
So you’re saying there’s a chance.
ok so the monkeys need to type faster
And we need more of them!
Let’s put them in open spaces in offices and micro-mananage then, that’ll work.
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.
We could breed monkeys to much higher populations.
If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.
enough to cut a few zeros of a number with 10 million of them
How is this a study? It’s just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.
It’s not a “study”, it’s just 2 mathematicians having some fun. The paper is a good read, and as a math teacher I see a lot of pedagogical values in such publications.
