The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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
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      1 month ago

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

      • murmelade@lemmy.ml
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        1 month ago

        The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.

    • Ogmios@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

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

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and that means we never would have.

      • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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        1 month ago

        Why must the concept of time before the big bang (or after our heat death) exist in our physical reality for us to speculate about theoretical infinities past those? The thought experiment is about infinite time, not all the time in our limited universe. A lot of things happen at infinity that break down as soon as you add a limit, but we’re not talking limits when we’re talking infinity.

      • Starbuncle@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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).

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      1 month ago

      I can’t remember the author or title, but that was the idea for a story I once read.

      God sends an angel and the monkeys to do the job. They get close, but when the angel is doing the final read through he sees "…to be, or not to beee, Damn the ‘E’ key is sticking. " And they have to start over

  • shrugs@lemmy.world
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    1 month 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?!

  • SlamWich@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

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

    • kofe@lemmy.world
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      1 month 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
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        1 month 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
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          1 month 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.

    • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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      1 month ago

      Everyone keeps forgetting that we’re all just what monkeys evolved into…

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        Actually, both monkeys and us are what our common ancestors evolved into. Which was neither a human nor a monkey.

    • Yaysuz@lemm.ee
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      1 month 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.

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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    1 month 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.

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      1 month ago

      I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time). There are a finite (but extremely large) number of configurations of English characters in a work the length of Hamlet. If you have truly an infinite number of attempts (monkeys, time, or both are actually infinite) and the trials are all truly random (every character is guaranteed to have the same chance as every other) then you will necessarily arrive at that configuration eventually.

      As far as your process, of procedurally generating each letter one by one until you have the completed works, we actually have a monkey who more or less did that already. His name is William.