Thats not the point of the thought experiment.
You have to realize, that with infinite time, if something has even the slightest chance of happening, it happens infinite times. So no, its not misleading, you have infinity for this to happen an infinite amount of times. Infinity breaks things.
I mean we’ve not had infinite monkeys yet one of us already wrote Shakespeare’s works
Yeah, no, using a finite number to try and disprove a theory that is all specifically about infinite numbers isn’t poking holes in anything…
the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.
Which means that while mathematically true, the theorem is “misleading”, they said.
Gotta read the articles 👍
Gotta read the articles 👍
No, you…
As well as looking at the abilities of a single monkey, the study also did a series of calculations based on the current global population of chimpanzees, which is roughly 200,000.
(E: never mind that, as has already been suggested to you, the theoretical thought experiment in question specifies not only infinite monkeys, but infinite time too, so they’ve not stuck to either parameter)
(E: never mind that, as has already been suggested to you, the theoretical thought experiment in question specifies not only infinite monkeys, but infinite time too, so they’ve not stuck to either parameter)
Whoah, whoah, whoah… Big critical thinker here thinks the paper is about disproving a thought experiment?
You understand that this is impossible? Even if it were attempted, such a venture is more a philosophical one, not a mathematicians forte.
Obviously the paper is not looking at that, it’s doing math
“Yes, it is true that given infinite resources, any text of any length would inevitably be produced eventually. While true, this also has no relevance to our own universe, as ‘reaching infinity’ in resources is not something which can ever happen.”
That needing to be pointed out to you is… Well you’ll have to excuse me if I don’t waste my energy “critically thinking” yet 👍
The “theorem”, if we wanna call it that, says that, given an infinite amount of monkeys and time, they could write Shakespeare.
This doesn’t mean it’s actually possible in the real world, it’s just to say that random events can seem, from the outside, like intelligent creations. Like a cloud that looks like a pig, no one actually created it to look like that, it was just random happenstance.
The theorem is not misleading, it literally states infinite monkeys. Not 200k monkeys or even 200 decillion monkeys, infinite. If it’s possible for the monkeys to press the keys in the right order, then the time it will take for one of them to write Shakespeare’s complete works will be limited only by their typing speed.
If there are an infinite number of trials (either infinite monkeys or infinite time), the outcome is truly random, and the desired text is finite, it must necessarily happen at some point. In fact, it’d happen an infinite number of times.
The original thought experiment clearly states infinite. As soon as you bound that in any way (such as not infinite monkeys, but 1 monkey for every atom in the universe) you’re talking about another experiment entirely. Infinite means infinite, not really really big. Gotta use some critical thinking 👍
Says descendant of monkey
“Extremely unlikely” != “never”
It’s very unlikely to brute force modern encryption; but you might get lucky and crack it after only 3 or 4 tries. Just because there are 18 quadrillion+ possible permutations, doesn’t mean you have to go through all of them before you find the right solution.
There are an infinite number of values between one and two and none of them equal three.
