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.
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.
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.
OK, what about 2 monkeys?
The whole point of the thought experiment is that you have infinite monkeys.
I don’t think so, because if you had infinite monkeys an infinite number of them would get it on the first try.
Exactly. That’s the point.
I don’t think it works honestly. You’d need a monkey with a lasting and dutiful commitment to true randomness to ever get anything but a finite number of button mashing variations. Monkeys like that don’t come cheaply.
Within that finite set, one combination is the complete text of Hamlet.
I honestly don’t think so, bestie. Monkey’s not gonna press the keys randomly at all. Somewhere in the recesses of his monkey neurons he’ll have made implicit connections between letters and letter combinations. This is the infinite typewriter monkey, not some two-bit organ grinder’s bitch. This monkey has been places, probably been through hell getting to this position in life. Seen wars, been across the globe, and now he’s the star of a famous thought experiment. He loves lowercase t because he’s a devout Christian after having been rescued by that missionary, and being a monkey he doesn’t quite grasp the distinction. Wanna see what he wrote? tttt hhdfyb my ik t tkkoptt aa aaaa Bernardo : Who’s there? tt ttt eeertyuhjk t
You call that random?
So… three monkeys?
At least
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.
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.
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’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.
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.
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?!
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.
> typeof Infinity 'number'Riddle me that, smart guy.
Damn, you just SLAMMED me.
Yes I know, but I was just trying to put into the perspective the person I was replying to.
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.
I’m still mad we are giving them typewriters instead of keyboards. Think of the arthritis! Ergonomics please!
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!
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 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.
What caught me out recently was infinity minus infinity.
It does not equal zero. Instead it breaks your sorting algorithm.
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).
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.
It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.
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…
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.
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?
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.
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.
What if it’s a smart monkey?
Of our sample size, 100% of “smart” (capable of symbolic language) monkey species have already written Hamlet.
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
