The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
If a tree folds in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it make a sound?
For this experiment scientists recruited Gilbert, no one really pays much attention to him, and it’s assumed the universe won’t either.
What if it’s a smart monkey?
Of our sample size, 100% of “smart” (capable of symbolic language) monkey species have already written Hamlet.
This is a false flag study to undermine public support for mathematics research!
This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.
Abiogenisis in shambles again
The statement isn’t about “A” monkey. It’s about an infinite amount of monkeys.
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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,”
Hypothesis: every science journalist should be placed in front of a bitch-slapping machine for the rest of their career. Every time they think about writing an article, they get bitch slapped. This will greatly improve the quality of science journalism.
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
I always heard that it was an infinite number of moneys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.
One of them is mathematically guaranteed to get the job done in time.
In fact - and here’s the trippy part - an infinite number of them is mathematically guaranteed to get the job done in time.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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…
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.
… the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.
But not zero.
Basically nothing is ever truly zero
I am.
Hello “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
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
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”.
I prefer Romeo and Juliet, act 1 scene 1 line 41. Just because the exchange is so silly.
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
Stealing this to be annoying with
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.
Who are you, who is so wise in the ways of science?
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.
But we aren’t talking about one monkey. We are talking about infinite monkeys.
Infinity is already a loaded concept in our universe.
Use infinite monkeys.
Fuuuuck there goes my plan to get this monkey to write Hamlet within the lifetime of the universe…
