this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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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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[–] [email protected] 5 points 46 minutes ago* (last edited 44 minutes ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 26 minutes ago* (last edited 26 minutes ago)

I'm still mad we are giving them typewriters instead of keyboards. Think of the arthritis! Ergonomics please!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

That's because they only considered one monkey.

You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 48 minutes ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 44 minutes ago

The whole study is trash. A chimpanzee is not a monkey.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 hour ago* (last edited 1 hour ago) (1 children)

But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔

[–] [email protected] 5 points 53 minutes ago

We have an infinite number of monkeys, one of them already wrote Hamlet.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 48 minutes ago

Okay but here me out, what if we 10^43 more monkeys to balance out the speed?

In fact, let's push this to an extreme. We get enough monkeys that their mass turns them all into one black hole. Inside the black hole, the laws of physics get all fucked. Next we need to somehow dissolve the event horizon as explained in This Kurzgesagt video. Once that happens and we are left with a bare singularity, anything can pop out of it, including a copy of Hamlet.

The monkeys, however, will very likely be dead.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 hour ago

Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 54 minutes ago

In other news, exponents make things big.

Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
N=130,000

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

This is a false flag study to undermine public support for mathematics research!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 4 hours 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.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 5 hours ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) (1 children)

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?!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Except the lifetime of the universe is quite small when compared to infinity, so it doesn't really convey how large infinity is because it's so much more.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

They don't convey the same information.

Infinity isn't really an amount of something.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 hours ago (1 children)
> typeof Infinity
'number'

Riddle me that, smart guy.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

Damn, you just SLAMMED me.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 hours ago

This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 hours ago (2 children)

How about 4 monkeys in parallel?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 hours ago (1 children)

Yes, and add an Agile framework. Extreme Monkey typing.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 hours ago

What about monkey AI to get ahead using lower paid monkeys?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 hours ago

Switch to AMD. More monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 hours ago (3 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

The other part of it is there's not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there's two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.

And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes

Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds

And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe

And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete

that's the point of the thought experiment

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

How would monkeys type through infinite. Don't they stop, are they not mortals like normal monkeys?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

For what it's worth, it seems like it's this "journalist" trying to make a sensational headline

The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality

"We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,"

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 hours ago* (last edited 1 hour ago)

I always heard that it was an infinite number of monkeys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 hours ago

They are, however, exceptionally adept at political speechwriting.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago

Really, it just takes an infinite amount of monkeys one time.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.

[–] [email protected] 56 points 9 hours ago (2 children)

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

You stupid monkey!

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