The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔
We have an infinite number of monkeys, one of them already wrote Hamlet.
it is also somewhat misleading
…what? No it isn’t. Restricting the premise from infinite to any finite amount of time completely negates it. That doesn’t prove it’s “misleading”, it proves anyone that thinks it does has no idea what they’re talking about.
Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.
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”.
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
Stealing this to be annoying with
I prefer Romeo and Juliet, act 1 scene 1 line 41. Just because the exchange is so silly.
Wait …is this why AI exists? So we can type Hamlet in the face of monkey failures?
Dude. Just use a printer.
Omg I just realized AI is the new monkeys… that is disturbing
An ape could though.
Oh yeah? Name ONE ape that wrote Shakespeare. Go on I’ll wait
He’s probably got a dumb name, like Bill or Willie.
Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.
BrittneySpeare
Gyrategun. Shiversword. Vibratevibrator. Fidgetfalchion.
Are spelling and punctuation expected to be accurate?
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.
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
Let’s use our braincells to fix real problems first. Like pants that don’t stretch.
Infinity sorts it out for you, Karl
Abiogenisis in shambles again
I feel like there has to be more to this problem than pure probability. We ought to consider practical nuances like the tendency to randomly mash keys that are closer together rather than assume a uniform distribution.
Doesn’t matter in the real infinite monkeys thought experiment. The chance of an infinite number of monkeys at an infinite number of typewriters producing Shakespeare is 100%. That’s how infinity works.
Sure, but this time I thought these things might matter because the article gives a deadline - the end of the universe.
Who are you, who is so wise in the ways of science?
I wonder if it would take more or less time with auto-complete.
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
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
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.
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.
so you’re saying there’s a chance…
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.
Weird how neither of those numbers are infinities. Almost like the numbers used are unfathomably small in comparison.
… 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
I am.
Hello “Zero”!
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
