this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

The statement isn't about "A" monkey. It's about an infinite amount of monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 14 hours ago (3 children)

And an infinite amount of time.

This "rebuttal" is forced contrarianism. It's embarrassing.

A thought experiment has rules, you can't just change them and say the experiment doesn't make sense...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago

The other part of it is there's not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there's two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.

And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes

Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds

And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe

And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete

that's the point of the thought experiment

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

For what it's worth, it seems like it's this "journalist" trying to make a sensational headline

The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality

"We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,"

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

How about 4 monkeys in parallel?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, and add an Agile framework. Extreme Monkey typing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 12 hours ago

What about monkey AI to get ahead using lower paid monkeys?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 14 hours ago

Switch to AMD. More monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 12 hours ago

This is a false flag study to undermine public support for mathematics research!

[–] [email protected] 206 points 22 hours ago (8 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 95 points 21 hours ago

This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they've missed the point.

[–] 0x0 10 points 16 hours ago

the monkey has infinite time

Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?

[–] [email protected] 36 points 22 hours ago (10 children)

It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 19 hours ago (2 children)

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??

You stupid monkey!

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 13 hours ago

This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (1 children)

I always heard that it was an infinite number of monkeys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 hours ago

Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 14 hours ago

Really, it just takes an infinite amount of monkeys one time.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 18 hours ago

Strong entry for an Ig Nobel Prize if nothing else.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 21 hours ago* (last edited 21 hours ago) (6 children)

I have a way to make it work.

Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won't be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare's complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare's works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let's increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to... let's say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it'll take around 30min to type the right character.

It would take even longer, right? Well... not really. Shakespeare's complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare's complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren't talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it'll take at most a few days.


Why am I sharing this? I'm not invalidating the paper, mind you, it's cool maths.

I've found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can't appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can't type the full works of Shakespeare.

Complex life is not the result of a single "big" mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen...) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 19 hours ago (11 children)

I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time). There are a finite (but extremely large) number of configurations of English characters in a work the length of Hamlet. If you have truly an infinite number of attempts (monkeys, time, or both are actually infinite) and the trials are all truly random (every character is guaranteed to have the same chance as every other) then you will necessarily arrive at that configuration eventually.

As far as your process, of procedurally generating each letter one by one until you have the completed works, we actually have a monkey who more or less did that already. His name is William.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 hours ago

I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time).

I know. It's just that creationists misuse that metaphor so often that I couldn't help but share my brainfart here.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 hours ago

In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

[–] [email protected] 2 points 12 hours ago

They are, however, exceptionally adept at political speechwriting.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago (30 children)

Yeah, that’s why we need at least... two of them.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 20 hours ago

They forgot the lifespan of the monkey, those thought experimenters.

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