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

  • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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    1 day ago

    But we aren’t talking about one monkey. We are talking about infinite monkeys.

    Infinity is already a loaded concept in our universe.

  • SlamWich@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This is clownery, humanity is infinite monkeys, and we wrote Hamlet ages ago.

    • kofe@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Are they arguing it wasn’t random though? I mean Shakespeare had to think through the plot and everything, not just scribble nonsense on a page

      • pinkystew@reddthat.com
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        1 day ago

        The thought experiment suggests that over a long enough period of time, every possible combination of letters would be typed out on a keyboard, including Hamlet.

        They are not arguing about randomness, as it is inherent to the thought experiment. Randomness is necessary for the experiment to occur.

        They are arguing that the universe would be dead before the time criteria is met. It is a bitter and sarcastic conclusion to the thought experiment, and is supposed to be funny.

        In conversation, it would be delivered like this:

        “You know, over a long enough period of time, monkeys smashing typewriters randomly would eventually produce Hamlet”

        “The universe isn’t going to last that long.”

        • pinkystew@reddthat.com
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          1 day ago

          Nobody asked but I had to share this

          It’s important to me that everyone understands the joke, even if that understanding robs them of the joy of it. “Explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. It kills it”.

          But it’s important because I suffered a lot of being left out as a kid. Others found how good it felt to be exclusive, and shoulder me out of things, or refuse to explain things, or whatever it was that made me the outcast. I could tell from their faces that they love the way it felt when they did that to me. But it hurt me a lot.

          I don’t want there to be any exclusivity anymore. Nobody deserves that pain. I want everyone to understand the joke, even if that prevents them from ever laughing at it.

    • CaptKoala@lemmy.ml
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      2 days ago

      Everyone keeps forgetting that we’re all just what monkeys evolved into…

      • superkret@feddit.org
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        2 days ago

        Actually, both monkeys and us are what our common ancestors evolved into. Which was neither a human nor a monkey.

  • irotsoma@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    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.

  • onnekas@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    There’s still a chance that a monkey will type it on the first attempt. It’s just very small.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    How is the infinite monkey theorum “misleading”. It’s got “infinite” in the name. If you’re applying constraints based on the size or age of the universe, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the thought experiment.

    • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      Infinite monkeys would produce everything in the time that it would take to type it out as fast as anyone can type, infinite times. There would also be infinite variations of slower versions, including an infinite number of versions where everything but the final period is written, but it never gets added (same with every other permutation of missing characters and extra ones added).

      There would be infinite monkeys that only type one of Shakespeare’s plays or poems, and infinite monkeys that type some number greater than that, and even infinite monkeys that type out plays Shakespeare wanted to write but never got around to, plus infinite fan fictions about one or more of his plays.

      Like infinite variations of plays where Juliette kills Hamlet, Ceasar puts on a miraculous defense and then divides Europe into the modern countries it’s made up of today, Romeo falls in love with King Lear, and Transformers save the Thundercats from the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles who were brainwashed to think they were ancient normal samurai lizards. Some variations having all of that in the same play.

      That’s the thing about infinity. If there’s any chance of something happening at all, it happens infinite times.

      Even meta variants would all happen. Like if there’s any chance a group of monkeys typing randomly on typewriters could form a computer, there would be infinite variations of that computer in that infinite field of monkeys, including infinite ones that are trying to stimulate infinite monkeys making up a computer to verify that those monkeys make up a valid computer worth building and don’t have some bug where the temperature gets too high and melts some of the monkeys or the food delivery system isn’t fast enough to keep up and breaks down because monkeys get too tired to keep up with necessary timings.

      BUT, even though all of these would exist in that infinite sea of monkeys, there would be far more monkeys just doing monkey things. So many more that you could spend your whole lifetime jumping to random locations within that sea of monkeys and never see any of the random organization popping out, despite an infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their whole existence to making sure you, specifically, can find them (they might be too busy fighting off the infinite number of monkeys and societies of monkeys dedicating their lives to prevent you from ever finding non-noise in the sea of monkeys).

  • PetteriPano@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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!

    • Botzo@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.

      • murmelade@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.

    • Ogmios@sh.itjust.works
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      3 days ago

      It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.

    • scarabic@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      Infinite time is undefined though. We are not sure there was time before the Big Bang. Before anyone says “but there must have been,” consider that it’s just as paradoxical and mind blowing to imagine that time never had a beginning and just stretches infinitely into the past. How can that be so? It means it would have taken an infinite amount of time for us to reach this moment in time, and that means we never would have.