Something weird I've been noticing. Lately I've been unintentionally minimizing comments before I've finished reading them. Just happened with yours. It's like some subconscious part of my brain goes "booorrring!" half way through reading anything longer than two sentences and immediately goes for the next dopamine kick.

And I'm not knocking your comment. I was genuinely interested in what I was reading. It's just a little troubling. I dropped Reddit and Lemmy a while back because I felt like I was becoming addicted. I lasted a few months, but evidently I've fallen off the wagon.

So as weird as it sounds not all infinities are equal. For example there is an infinite set of odd numbers. That set will never include the number 2 though.

1 monkey would likely die before producing Shakespeare

One monkey may never produce it even given infinite time. It could just produce an infinite string of the letter a and never change it's mind. That's less likely that it writing hamlet, or even many hamlets... But nonetheless, it could. In fact all of the infinite monkeys could do that. If you repeated the experiment and infinite number of times, it's likely that one of them will simple produce an infinite number of infinite strings of only the letter A. Or, idk, ASCII art.

I have read the paper, the news make it seem like something that is not. It's a tough experiment and mostly a joke. From the paper closing remarks:

Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation. 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”.

Hell, infinite monkeys over a finite amount of time or finite monkeys over an infinite amount of time does the trick.

It's also possible that it's not possible even on an infinite time scale. A quick example: if you asked an algorithm to choose a number, and you choose 6536639876555721, but the algorithm only chooses from the infinite number of even numbers, it will never choose your number. So for the monkeys, if they are just not 'programmed' to ever be able to write a whole Shakespeare play, they will not be able to even with infinite time and infinite moneys.

Combined Monkey Years just aren't the same since their lead singer left, I'm hoping they improve eventually.

Alas, not on a typewriter... Back to the drawing board!

The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of "infinite monkeys". An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it'll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don't even need the infinite time.

It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.

And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There's no infinite time.

if it's infinite monkeys then an infinite amount of them do it correct on the first try