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.
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.
Fuuuuck there goes my plan to get this monkey to write Hamlet within the lifetime of the universe…
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.
There’s still a chance that a monkey will type it on the first attempt. It’s just very small.
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.
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.
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.
What if it’s a smart monkey?
Of our sample size, 100% of “smart” (capable of symbolic language) monkey species have already written Hamlet.
So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…
The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.
Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.
With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞
It’s a lot of monkeys.
Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.
infinite amount of monkeys could produce infinite amount of information, i dont see the point
The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).
Maybe it’s becaue scientists have very poor imagination of the universe.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? You stupid monkey!
Well you’re not supposed to just have one. It’s supposed to be a thousand monkies at a thousand typewriters.
Now do the Mythbusters thing and figure out how many monkies and typewriters it would take for them to write Hamlet in just under a year. Don’t just solve the myth; put it to the test!
I thought it was supposed to be an infinite amount of monkeys, since it’s known as “infinite monkey theorem”, but apparently, according to Wikipedia,
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. […]
[…] can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.
However, I think, as long as either the timeframe or monkey amount is infinite, it should lead to the same results. So, why even limit one of them on this theoretical level after all?
The linked study even seems to limit both, so they’re not quite investigating the actual classic theorem of one monkey with infinite time, it seems.
As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees, and they assumed a rather productive typing speed of one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10100 years.
They did 200k monkeys, so a little overkill from your expectations.
What if the monkeys evolve to higher intelligence as time passes by?
You maniacs!
I’m still mad we are giving them typewriters instead of keyboards. Think of the arthritis! Ergonomics please!
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.
That’s because they only considered one monkey.
You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.
They did not limit themselves to one monkey. From the article:
As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees.
The whole study is trash. A chimpanzee is not a monkey.
It was the beat of times, it was the blurst of times
Stupid monkey
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.
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.
