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

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

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42 points

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

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16 points

from the wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem

If there were as many monkeys as there are atoms in the observable universe typing extremely fast for trillions of times the life of the universe, the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.

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36 points

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

But not zero.

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10 points

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

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4 points

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.

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3 points

so you’re saying there’s a chance…

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1 point

So you’re saying there’s a chance.

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7 points

ok so the monkeys need to type faster

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3 points

Let’s put them in open spaces in offices and micro-mananage then, that’ll work.

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3 points

And we need more of them!

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6 points

Irrelevant. The heat death of the universe is a constraint unrelated to the premise of the original problem.

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2 points
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I don’t think it’s a constraint, it’s more like a measuring stick to try to show how ridiculously long that time is

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1 point

It’s really not that long, if we can’t get monkeys to write Shakespeare.

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3 points

We could breed monkeys to much higher populations.

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2 points

If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.

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2 points

enough to cut a few zeros of a number with 10 million of them

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