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

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    3 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
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    4 days ago

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

    • kofe@lemmy.world
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      3 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
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        3 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
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          3 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.

    • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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      4 days ago

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

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        4 days ago

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

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
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    5 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
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      5 days 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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        4 days ago

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

    • Ogmios@sh.itjust.works
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      5 days ago

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

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      5 days 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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        5 days 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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        4 days 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.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    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
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      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).

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    4 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
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    4 days ago

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

  • shrugs@lemmy.world
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    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?!

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      4 days 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

  • SimpleMachine@lemmy.world
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    4 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.

    • cammoblammo@lemmy.world
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      4 days 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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days 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.

    • Yaysuz@lemm.ee
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      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.

          • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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            4 days ago

            I don’t think it works honestly. You’d need a monkey with a lasting and dutiful commitment to true randomness to ever get anything but a finite number of button mashing variations. Monkeys like that don’t come cheaply.

              • The Snark Urge@lemmy.world
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                4 days ago

                I honestly don’t think so, bestie. Monkey’s not gonna press the keys randomly at all. Somewhere in the recesses of his monkey neurons he’ll have made implicit connections between letters and letter combinations. This is the infinite typewriter monkey, not some two-bit organ grinder’s bitch. This monkey has been places, probably been through hell getting to this position in life. Seen wars, been across the globe, and now he’s the star of a famous thought experiment. He loves lowercase t because he’s a devout Christian after having been rescued by that missionary, and being a monkey he doesn’t quite grasp the distinction. Wanna see what he wrote? tttt hhdfyb my ik t tkkoptt aa aaaa Bernardo : Who’s there? tt ttt eeertyuhjk t

                You call that random?

    • Eager Eagle@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      the paper used the entire population (200 thousand) and would take some 10 ^ 10 ^ 7 heat deaths of the universe

      • Nougat@fedia.io
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        5 days ago

        It could happen the very first time a monkey sat down at a typewriter. It’s just very unlikely.

          • Nougat@fedia.io
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            5 days ago

            … the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.

            But not zero.

          • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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            5 days ago

            Weird how neither of those numbers are infinities. Almost like the numbers used are unfathomably small in comparison.

          • scarabic@lemmy.world
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            5 days ago

            So you’re telling me… there’s a chance!

            Sorry, I’m sort of lampooning comments like the one above and below you where people just can’t resist focusing on the possibility, no matter how ridiculously remote it seems. For myself, there’s a point of “functionally zero odds” that I’m willing to accept and move on with my life.