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Wasn’t the saying an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters? If so then they’d write Hamlet and indeed every other book written or ever will be written in however long it would conceivably take to type them out if you were copying them.
I don’t really know how this myth? paradox is supposed to work? I know infinity isn’t a number but a concept and in theory I understand what it’s trying to say, but if I have an infinite amount of scrap yards and infinite amount of tornadoes, they can go on forever, but they’ll never assemble a Boing 747.
Not the same the monkeys have all the capabilities and tools to cohesively combine letters words and white space. A tornado cannot weld and program controllers and solder. But a monkey can type randomly even wacking randomly. The idea is that given an infinite truly random output of text by the nature of infinity the text of Shakespeare will be outputted in its entirety eventually
The idea is that given an infinite truly random output of text by the nature of infinity the text of Shakespeare will be outputted in its entirety eventually
Only for a certain kind of randomness. For example, it’s possible to construct a random process that at each step emits a uniformly distributed character, but which also includes a filter that blocks the emission of the string “Falstaff” if it occurs. Such a process cannot ever produce the complete works of Shakespeare, since the complete works include that string, though it will still contain (for example) every lost work of Aristotle, as well as an infinite number of false and corrupted versions of those works.
But yeah, an unconstrained uniform-random-distributed countably infinite sequence of printable English characters and whitespace cannot be proven to not contain the complete works of Shakespeare, or any other finite sequence. I believe it’s also impossible to exclude any countably infinite sequence, but I might be wrong on that part, since my mathematics education happened a very long time ago.
I guess that was kinda what I was trying to convey in the truly random part. Truly random in which you have no idea what character will be next, no filter. In that case yes which I believe is what most people think of when they think of random
Same way in the infinite random non repeating numbers of Pi is the binary of a 4k resolution photo of Betty White nude holding a snake on a tiger.
It’s random forever and eventually the 1s and 0s fall into place. The problem is the monkeys repeating themselves.
The problem here is the implied entropic outcomes of each system.
If the monkeys were replaced with true-random number generators, then you’d eventually get shakespear. But they aren’t RNG engines, and they aren’t quantumly random.
Instead, the monkeys have a large-ish but very finite number of logical branches that they can take in their decision-making processes, with slight variations within a fixed genetic scope. They will slam away at the typewriters in a very specific monkey kind of way.
At the end of the thought experiment, you will end up with an infinite amount of monkey-gibberish and a slightly smaller infinite amount of soiled or destroyed typewriters.
If the monkeys’ probability distribution function can be transformed to a uniform distribution by a continuous function, the outcomes are equivalent enough for this exercise. (There are probably some discontinous functions that’d also work). So, unless there’s some genetic weirdness in monkeys that prevents their ever hitting certain keys, they’re adequate RNG engines. But at that point, you’re really tweaking the assumptions based on how realistically you think monkeys are portrayed in the thought experiment.
And I don’t believe “quantumly random” is a necessary condition here.
An infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on an infinite number of typewriters, so long as the writing is truly random, will eventually write every novel. Once you factor in the infinite number of monkeys, every novel in existence will not only be written, it will be written an infinite number of times.
It’s like saying if you had a random number generator and gave it an infinite amount of time generating 16 numbers at a time, it would eventually generate every bank card number ever an infinite number of times. Give that task to an infinite number of random number generators and they will generate every bank card number an infinite number of times instantaneously.
Come to think of it, if the tornado throws around junk completely randomly, and provided there’s enough material in every junkyard to assemble a plane, the tornado will eventually assemble it. That’s the power of infinity and randomness.
Once you factor in the infinite number of monkeys, every novel in existence will not only be written, it will be written an infinite number of times.
You don’t need an infinite number of monkeys to ensure that. The cardinality of an infinite collection of 2-tuples (monkey, char) is the same as the cardinality of an infinite sequence of characters, just as the cardinality of the rational numbers is the same as the cardinality of the integers.
And in a countably infinite sequence of uniformly random characters, there is no assurance that any particular finite sequence will occur only a finite number of times.
🤓
You know it? That’s nice. A lot of people think they know a lot of things that aren’t really true.
Now prove it.
Thats not the point of the thought experiment.
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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.
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Literally, someone just wanted grant money or something.
Given an infinite number of peers, any research paper can get peer reviewed
The time taken for “a” typing monkey? We have infinite monkeys! Why are we putting the entire burden on just one of them? One of them takes Hamlet, another takes King Lear, two of them collaborate to write Twelfth Night…
200,000 chimpanzees is = to zero monkeys. The study is flawed.
insane that THIS gets headlines which is literally just recording a monkey with a keyboard and running 3 lines of python, purposely missing the point of the saying.
This doesn’t bode well for my typewriting monkey startup
Aka most AI startups.
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”
A stupid article akin to someone on Lemmy misunderstanding an idium and going “well actually…”.
And that’s coming from me, a person who likes knowing how insanely unlikely it is a guess ever longer and longer pass phrases. A computer trying to brute force Hamlet would also fail before the heat death of the universe (probably, anyway- do the math and you too can publish junk!).
The probability that a monkey would throw its shit against the wall and have it look exactly like Shakespeare is, on the other hand, extremely likely in our lifetime.
Says descendant of monkey
Apes, actually.
Trash “research” and trash journalism covering it. First they find that monkeys would write Shakespeare, it would just take on average longer than the entire existence of the universe. They then try to infer that how long it takes is relevant. It is not. The calculation is vaguely interesting as a curio but the shoehorned “discussion” and interpretation to get attention is crap and another example of bad science misleading people.
It’s pointless and stupid - the thought experiment itself is that infinite monkeys typing would eventually type the whole of Shakespeare. Not how long it would take. The whole point of it is that in a truly random system all known patterns should eventually emerge somewhere within it. The length of time it takes for the pattern to emerge is irrelevant as the idea is based in infinity. So for example if there is a truly random infinite multiverse then in theory all imaginable possibilities would exist somewhere within it at some point.
The whole point of it is that in a truly random system all known patterns should eventually emerge somewhere within it.
So pi (probably) has this property. There are some joke compression programs around this (they don’t really work because it takes up more space to store where something in pi is, than storing the thing itself). But it is funny, to think that pi could theoretically hold every past, present, and future piece of information within those digits after the decimal.
https://github.com/philipl/pifs
https://ntietz.com/blog/why-we-cant-compress-messages-with-pi/
Also interesting is the notion of ‘Kolmogorov Complexity’ - what is the shortest programme that could produce a given output? Worst case for a truly random sequence would just be to copy it out, but a programme that outputs eg. a million digits of pi can actually be quite short. As can a programme that outputs a particular block cypher for an empty input. In general, it is very difficult to decide how long a programme is needed to produce a given output, and what the upper limit of compression could be.
“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.
Security is, and always has been, a matter of making your shit harder and take longer to break. Any security is penetrable, given enough time and willpower, just make sure it takes longer than it’s worth.
There are an infinite number of values between one and two and none of them equal three.
True and irrelevant.
I think their research is empirically falsified already. If chimp = monkey, then “simian” is reasonable generalisation of “monkey” - also that reflects a lot of real english speakers usage of the words.
A less than infinite number of simians have already done it once.
Not to mention that I think they’re assuming no evolution. Fucking chriatian fundamentalists.
I’m not christian and I assumed the experiment didn’t allow for evolution as it was not specified in its parameters. I assumed that the monkeys were a horrible (and very wrong) analogy for random number generators, were immortal, and had no time for making offspring as they were all trained and consumed with typewriting, or physically separated from one another.
The monkeys would produce wildly more limited results than a random number generator mind you, and they are essentially frozen in evolutionary time, so they are not going to be writing shakespear.
Not to mention that I think they’re assuming no evolution. Fucking chriatian fundamentalists.
Wut.
A less than infinite number of simians have already done it once.
And how likely is it that it’ll be done again identically by a finite set of simians?
CLICKBAIT the theory goes “if given an infinite amount of time, a monkey pressing keys on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare.” and then they say that would take longer than the universe would exist. SEE THE ORIGINAL QUOTE… INFINITE TIME. Also that is if it went through every combination. Due to Random Chance it could happen the 3rd try of you doing it.
This is a nothing burger of a story about some mathematicians that crunched some of the numbers involved and didn’t like what they saw.
Awww, Muffin.
FACT: 90% of typing monkeys quit right when they’re about to write Shakespeare.
