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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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[-] SimpleMachine@lemmy.world 25 points 4 weeks ago

Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn't become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.

[-] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 points 4 weeks ago

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime.

That sounds a little low to me. B and N are right next to each other, so I'd expect them to mash left and right among similar keys a lot of the time. Then again, I think we're expecting some randomness here, not an actual chimp at a typewriter, but that's probably more likely to reproduce longer works than an actual chimp.

[-] cammoblammo@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

I get annoyed when websites say something like, ´Using a password of this strength will take a a hacker one million years to brute force.´

No, it’ll take a million years to try every combination and permutation of allowed characters. Chances are your password will be tried much sooner than that.

[-] tomalley8342@lemmy.world 4 points 4 weeks ago

When they say such things, the are probably talking about the expected value, where those chances are taken into account, just like the number calculated in this article.

this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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