What happens if they write the communist manifesto before any works of Shakespeare?
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It’s not literal.
It’s a way to explain that any result is possible.
Like, throw some matter/energy in any closed system, and eventually, everything and anything possible will happen on an infinite timeline.
So sure, 99.9999999999999999% are going to poop on it, but on an infinite scale, you’d get Shakespeare
Okay, but apes have already written the collected works of Shakespeare.
Well no. You can try to count every real number forever and you will miss infinitely many still. Some infinites are larger than others, hence I do not see any reason why “infinite time” would cover “every possibility happening”. On the other hand, if you do have a mathematical proof you could refer to, I would be most grateful.
EDIT: To write out my example, let us consider a machine that picks a random number between 3 and 4 every second. Then there is every second a nonzero chance that this machine (assuming true and not pseudo randomness) will pick, say pi. The range of numbers picked constitute the image of a function from the whole numbers to the real numbers (up to isomporphism), which cannot be surjective. Hence there are numbers not picked even though there was a > 0 chance of picking them every second for an infinite time.
Then there is every second a nonzero chance that this machine (assuming true and not pseudo randomness) will pick, say pi.
No. The probability of picking any particular number from a uniform distribution is 0.
On the contrary, since the works of Shakespeare are a finite string over a finite alphabet (I can formalize this argument if you want), the probability of typing them out after some fixed large number of keystrokes is some nonzero number 𝑝. With 𝑛 monkeys, the probability that at least one will type out the works is 1 − (1 − 𝑝)ⁿ, which goes to 1 as 𝑛 → ∞.
Now, you are right that this does not mean that the works are guaranteed to be typed out. However, it has probability 1, so it’s mathematically “almost certain”.
I don’t think I understand your example but I feel like people downvoting you without arguing the math is something that should be left to twitter and reddit.
Thanks. It was a bit poorly worded, but I do think the original statement is wrong and just wanted to sketch an idea of why.
I hear what you are saying and agree. I never took the monkey Shakespeare theory seriously. It sounded a bit too poppy and quite honestly the guy that told me was a douche and pronounced giblets wrong. But as a theory you could get anything in a long enough time span and infinite amount of resources. Why or how that matters? Well I just don’t see it.
Of course I am not denying that anything possible could happen. That is contradictory to the assumption it was possible in the first place. What I am saying is just that not all that is possible will happen, even if given an infinite time to do so.
EDIT: Unfortunately, given a setup like this the math says monkey Shakespeare will almost surely happen due to there only being finite variations.
Oh I get you. I see it the same way. I saw it as an interesting thought experiment.
Is it pronounced like gif?
Even funnier in your example is that the chance of any real number ever being picked is infinitesimally small, instead of guaranteed.
Yep! Relatively speaking almost none of them will be picked. The same is also true even if one had a countable infinite amount of machines trying to pick these numbers.
Infinite, sure. But the universe doesn’t have infinite. There are SO many english words that just putting them together randomly it’s still effectively impossible to generate a work of Shakespear.
And even with as much tech as we can imagine, the universe is finite to our reach and especially to our time. The odds of randomly generating Shakespear is so low even using a processor the size of the sun, the heat death of the universe might happen first. It’s theoretically possible, but so is a planet that spontaneously generates made of nothing but cheddar cheese.
I don’t think you quite grasp how a hypothetical works.
the universe is finite to our reach and especially to our time
Some of the smartest people alive don’t think so…
Big Bangs can be sequential, an endless cycle. Even in a “heat death” there’s still black holes that over trillions and trillions of years will keep slowly getting closer to each other until eventually they combine.
The real heat death of the universe is one super massive black hole, and on a long enough timeline something will eventually happen which makes it spit all that matter and energy back out. Or even weirder, the inside is the new universe likely with random ass physics.
Like I said, the monkeys arent literal. It’s a way to explain that infinite means everything
That’s incorrect. The universe is infinite. But without FTL travel we can’t access anything but the observable which is finite.
In heat death even black holes will evaporate. There is no anything ultimately in heat death. Just particles flying every way getting farther apart.
Also there’s not even a theoretical way to survive a big crunch, big bang cycle.
One day someone is going to open their dryer and all their laundry is going to land perfectly folded based on that same theory. Maybe it is possible, but incredibly unlikely and even if it did happen you’d probably miss that particular revolution of the dryer.
A finite number of monkeys would almost certainly just destroy their finite number of typewriters long before they randomly bashed out anything coherent, let alone Shakespeare. Infinite monkeys with infinite typewriters don’t have that problem though. As long as it doesnt break the laws of physics it would eventually happen, no matter how unlikely it is. That’s the whole point.
In fact it would happen in as fast a time as theoretically possible
This raises an interesting question: Do other primates even have the same anatomy to get carpal tunnel? It’s just an inflammation of tissue in a very narrow part of the wrist that puts pressure on a nerve. Do monkies even have the same kind of tissues in the same narrow passage to get inflamed enough that it causes pressure on a nerve that gives mobility issues to their hands?
It’s infinite monkeys over infinite time. Yeah, some would get carpel tunnel (an infinite number of them) and some would form labour unions (an infinite number of labour unions). There would be an infinite number of cults, and an infinite number of supreme leaders would rise. You’d have an infinite number of “it’s almost Shakespeare but you got one character wrong”, many more than complete Shakespeare works. And it would increase as you include more and more errors.
With an infinite amount of monkeys, this would start happening in the minimum amount of time it takes for any of that to happen. You don’t even really need infinite time once you have infinite monkeys, but finite monkeys with infinite time are different because then you have a finite number of outcomes and extinction might arrive before they have a chance to achieve each one.
How can you get infinite monkeys to all stop writing?
“It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times… you stupid monkey!”
Reddit is basically prove that this theory is bullshit anyway.
There aren’t infinite monkeys on reddit. There is Shaekspeare on reddit. Lemmy isn’t any better.
Reddit comes pretty close to infinite monkeys with infinite time. Lemmy has just much fewer monkeys.
Reddit is less creative than it is distributive. Terrible place for original content, but a reliable location to find reposts of trending material produced elsewhere.
If you’re looking for a real “10,000 monkeys on typewriters” situation, you’d be better off trolling through Tumblr or DeviantArt or 4chan.
It was more of an attempt at a joke. But the comments on reddit are rather close to the infinite monkey situation. While you are absolutely right that 4chan might be even closer. But 4chan is too hardcore for me, so I kind of forgot about it.
the comments on reddit are rather close to the infinite monkey situation
Damn, I wish they were that creative. I feel like there’s maybe 30 different predefined Reddit Comments that just get randomly spat out by a generator ever few minutes.
But 4chan is too hardcore for me, so I kind of forgot about it.
Fair. But nothing recreates the experience of a dozen chimps throwing shit at one another like 4chan.
It’s a thought exercise and a metaphor, not literal
You don’t actually need infinite time if you have infinite monkeys with typewriters. If the typing is truly random, one of the moneys will type the complete works of Shakespeare on the first try. Or maybe infinitely many will, but then you start having to reason about different sizes of infinity.
Always thought this was BS and Wikipedia confirms my assumption:
In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”, the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine.
They gave monkeys a computer. Instead of Shakespeare, the result was Twitter.
A rose by any other name…
Those monkeys wrote a better love story than Twilight
Too few monkeys
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_ape_language
Definitely appears that there’s some kind of soft-cap on what Great Apes outside the human genus are capable of mastering. 10,000 monkeys given an infinite amount of time will be unable to produce a work of Shakespeare primarily because they cannot grasp the ideas of grammar and or symbolic speech.
Even setting aside whether some number of macaques can learn to master the use of a typewriter, there’s a real reason to believe they aren’t equipped to derive complex and multi-layered vocabulary. Shakespeare is replete with puns and monkeys just don’t grasp that kind of language.
Research into great ape language has involved teaching chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans to communicate with humans and each other using sign language, physical tokens, lexigrams, and imitative human speech. Some primatologists argue that the use of these communication methods indicate primate “language” ability, though this depends on one’s definition of language.
Lol on that last sentence (emphasis mine)
I dnn’t know, we might get this gem from the monkeys first “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.” I would consider that a win even more than the monkey’s forming a very militant labor union.
I would think that monkey art, given a surplus of free time, would evolve at the pace of their own lived experiences and accumulated craft skills. Idk if we’d ever get Shakespeare, but we could very well get a more modern and ape-centric take on Planet of the Apes, Curious George, or Bedtime for Bonzo.
This cracked me up. Thanks. I needed this.
Me hiring monkey pinkertons for my infinite monkey theorem based publishing house, “wanna bet?”
/s
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