The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
This is clownery, humanity is infinite monkeys, and we wrote Hamlet ages ago.
Everyone keeps forgetting that we’re all just what monkeys evolved into…
Actually, both monkeys and us are what our common ancestors evolved into. Which was neither a human nor a monkey.
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.
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.
OK, what about 2 monkeys?
The whole point of the thought experiment is that you have infinite monkeys.
I don’t think so, because if you had infinite monkeys an infinite number of them would get it on the first try.
Exactly. That’s the point.
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.
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.
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.
When they say such things, the are probably talking about the expected value, where those chances are taken into account, just like the number calculated in this article.
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!
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.
The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.
