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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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[-] Honytawk@lemmy.zip 19 points 2 days ago

But we aren't talking about one monkey. We are talking about infinite monkeys.

Infinity is already a loaded concept in our universe.

[-] SlamWich@lemmy.world 43 points 3 days ago

This is clownery, humanity is infinite monkeys, and we wrote Hamlet ages ago.

[-] kofe@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days 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

[-] pinkystew@reddthat.com 5 points 2 days ago

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."

[-] pinkystew@reddthat.com 4 points 2 days ago

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.

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[-] PetteriPano@lemmy.world 230 points 4 days ago

The theorem holds true. The theorem states that the monkey has infinite time, not just the lifetime of our universe.

That's just lazy science to change the conditions to make sensational headlines. Bad scientists!

[-] Botzo@lemmy.world 107 points 4 days ago

This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they've missed the point.

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[-] ogmios@sh.itjust.works 38 points 4 days ago

It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.

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[-] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 95 points 4 days ago

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 11 points 4 days 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).

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[-] irotsoma@lemmy.world 20 points 3 days ago

Lifetime of the universe is infinitely less than infinite time. So they solved for the wrong problem. Of course it may take longer than the life of the universe, or it may happen in a year. That's the whole point of the concepts of infinity and true randomness. Once you put a limit on time or a restriction on randomness, then the thought experiment is broken. You've totally changed the equation.

[-] onnekas@sopuli.xyz 26 points 3 days ago

There's still a chance that a monkey will type it on the first attempt. It's just very small.

[-] SuperZorro@discuss.tchncs.de 8 points 2 days ago

If I understand statistics correctly, it's actually a 50/50 chance.

[-] shrugs@lemmy.world 53 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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?!

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[-] fjordbasa@lemmy.world 61 points 4 days ago

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

You stupid monkey!

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[-] SimpleMachine@lemmy.world 25 points 3 days 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.

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[-] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 days ago

Abiogenisis in shambles again

[-] Overshoot2648@lemm.ee 34 points 4 days ago

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

[-] Yaysuz@lemm.ee 15 points 4 days 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.

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 19 points 3 days ago
[-] Cryophilia@lemmy.world 21 points 3 days ago

The whole point of the thought experiment is that you have infinite monkeys.

[-] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago

I don't think so, because if you had infinite monkeys an infinite number of them would get it on the first try.

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[-] Zorque@lemmy.world 12 points 3 days ago
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[-] MentallyExhausted@reddthat.com 19 points 4 days ago

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

[-] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 40 points 4 days ago

Yeah, that’s why we need at least... two of them.

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[-] Kolanaki@yiffit.net 17 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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!

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[-] lvxferre@mander.xyz 30 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

I have a way to make it work.

Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won't be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare's complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare's works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let's increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to... let's say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it'll take around 30min to type the right character.

It would take even longer, right? Well... not really. Shakespeare's complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare's complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren't talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it'll take at most a few days.


Why am I sharing this? I'm not invalidating the paper, mind you, it's cool maths.

I've found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can't appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can't type the full works of Shakespeare.

Complex life is not the result of a single "big" mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen...) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.

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[-] jordanlund@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago

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

[-] todd_bonzalez@lemm.ee 31 points 4 days ago

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...

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[-] ech@lemm.ee 27 points 4 days ago

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.

[-] uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 3 days ago

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is...

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe -- not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light -- just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don't imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you'll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you're going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham's Number] = ∞

It's a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn't super useful unless you're dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin's Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn't random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

[-] Blackmist@feddit.uk 8 points 3 days ago

What caught me out recently was infinity minus infinity.

It does not equal zero. Instead it breaks your sorting algorithm.

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[-] mlg@lemmy.world 11 points 4 days ago

That's because they only considered one monkey.

You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.

[-] Kabaka@lemmy.blahaj.zone 10 points 4 days ago

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.

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[-] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 11 points 4 days ago

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.

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[-] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've read there are so many permutations of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, that in all the times decks have been shuffled through history, there's almost no chance any given arrangement has ever been repeated. If we could teach monkeys to shuffle cards I wonder how long it would take them to do it.

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this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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