1231
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[-] Donkter@lemmy.world 38 points 5 months ago

It's kind of an outdated now too since it was a thought experiment and the monkeys were a stand-in for an abstract concept of a machine that creates an infinite amount of text. We have proof that even a finite number of randomly generated words will produce at least the first 1,312,000 characters of Shakespeare.

https://libraryofbabel.info/

[-] MotoAsh@lemmy.world 18 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

Wrll that's exactly what I mean: The monkeys themselves have zero consciousness in the allegory. The ENTIRE POINT is they do not understand what they're writing. They are standing in for chaos, and Hamlet is standing in for any meaningful structure arising from chaos.

To add desire and intention to the allegory is SPECIFICALLY choosing to miss the entire point that the monkeys DO NOT know what they write, and that's critical to them being an agent of chaos.

[-] damnedfurry@lemmy.world 1 points 5 months ago

randomly generated words

The hypothetical monkeys don't type words, though. They type characters at random.

[-] Donkter@lemmy.world 2 points 5 months ago

So does the website.

this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2024
1231 points (98.0% liked)

Microblog Memes

5699 readers
4283 users here now

A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.

Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.

Rules:

  1. Please put at least one word relevant to the post in the post title.
  2. Be nice.
  3. No advertising, brand promotion or guerilla marketing.
  4. Posters are encouraged to link to the toot or tweet etc in the description of posts.

Related communities:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS