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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[–] MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com 6 points 2 hours ago

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? You stupid monkey!

[–] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 13 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] LifeInMultipleChoice@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 hours ago* (last edited 3 hours ago)

I'm still mad we are giving them typewriters instead of keyboards. Think of the arthritis! Ergonomics please!

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 11 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

That's because they only considered one monkey.

You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.

[–] Kabaka@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SlapnutsGT@lemmy.world 8 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (1 children)

But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔

[–] CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 8 points 3 hours ago

We have an infinite number of monkeys, one of them already wrote Hamlet.

[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 10 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

There was a plank computer post here last couple of days. It showed an atomic sized computer performing one crack attempt every 10^-44 seconds would take a 95 character alphabet 100 years to crack a 121 character password.

Monkeys take up 1m^3. 10^105 bigger than a plank length. Typing 120wpm is 10^43 slower. Ignoring punctuation and spaces and capitalization, a 26 character alphabet allows for about 52 more characters than a 95 character alphabet.

Bottom line, monkeys can't come anywhere close to being able to crack a 100 character password from a 26 character alphabet.

[–] meep_launcher@lemm.ee 3 points 3 hours ago

Okay but here me out, what if we 10^43 more monkeys to balance out the speed?

In fact, let's push this to an extreme. We get enough monkeys that their mass turns them all into one black hole. Inside the black hole, the laws of physics get all fucked. Next we need to somehow dissolve the event horizon as explained in This Kurzgesagt video. Once that happens and we are left with a bare singularity, anything can pop out of it, including a copy of Hamlet.

The monkeys, however, will very likely be dead.

[–] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 67 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 hours ago

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).

[–] Overshoot2648@lemm.ee 27 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

How is this a study? It's just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.

[–] Yaysuz@lemm.ee 9 points 5 hours ago

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.

[–] shrugs@lemmy.world 45 points 8 hours ago* (last edited 8 hours ago) (1 children)

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?!

[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

They don't convey the same information.

Infinity isn't really an amount of something.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 9 points 6 hours ago (1 children)
> typeof Infinity
'number'

Riddle me that, smart guy.

[–] Takumidesh@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

Damn, you just SLAMMED me.

[–] explodicle@sh.itjust.works 3 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] nednobbins@lemm.ee 1 points 3 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

[–] jordanlund@lemmy.world 16 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 27 points 7 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...

[–] funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 4 points 6 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

[–] ozymandias117@lemmy.world 4 points 7 hours ago

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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[–] werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 9 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

How about 4 monkeys in parallel?

[–] Waldowal@lemmy.world 7 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] werefreeatlast@lemmy.world 3 points 5 hours ago

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

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 7 points 6 hours ago

Switch to AMD. More monkeys.

[–] style99@lemm.ee 6 points 6 hours ago

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

[–] 5in1k@lemm.ee 1 points 4 hours ago

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

[–] samus12345@lemmy.world 5 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago)

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.

[–] TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee 2 points 5 hours ago

They are, however, exceptionally adept at political speechwriting.

[–] fjordbasa@lemmy.world 57 points 12 hours ago (2 children)

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

You stupid monkey!

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[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 4 points 7 hours ago

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

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