We are IN the timeline where a monkey wrote Shakespeare. That monkey was Shakespeare.
Weird, what a coincidence
Not really, an almost infinite number of non-shakespeare monkeys came before him and also didn’t happen to write the entire works of shakespeare.
it was actually a significantly lower amount of monkeys than infinity
I mean it was bound to happen at some point
Yeah, it’s weird how nobody talks about the trillions of trillions of plays Shakespeare wrote that are complete gibberish.
Hey! I liked Romeo and Djrurleltkitshsnmqlaapj
Did you know a monkey can write Shakespeare’s work using this simple trick (millions of years of evolution)?
Yeah but did he do it with a typewriter? Didn’t think so
Shakespeare was an ape
Apes are monkeys. Fuck paraphyletic groups.
Monkeys and apes are monophyletic, you massive bastard. (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
…yes? That’s what I said.
A great one at that
He wrote it in the wrong order tho
He was an ape
What if you could math the monkeys?
Mind. Blown.
Unless you think it was a different monkey because someone without noble blood couldn’t possibly write good.
If you have an infinite amount of monkeys and they’re all typing truly randomly, then an infinite number of them would get it correct on the first try. Which is sort of weird to think about lol.
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I think too many people don’t consider the monkey is not supposed to be making decisions, it’s just supposed to be inputting anything, literally anything, on a typewriter.
Like a random value generator, for typewriter keys.
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Worse, creationists use the “watch maker’s paradox” as evidence of creation. Same idea but watch parts in a washing machine.
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What about a rock formation that happened to be a sun dial?
The thought experiment is about how wrist watches are incredibly complex and hand crafted machines so if you dissemble one and put all the parts in a clothes dryer you won’t get a watch back. (I believe given infinite time and random movements you would eventually get a watch.)
I mean, if they are actually monkeys who don’t know to type, some of them will still press keys once or twice. And if there’s infinite monkeys, they will still type it out.
Hell, if you have infinite time and infinite typewriters, you don’t even need the monkeys. You could probably depend on hail pressing those keys, the argument still stands. As long as there are inputs, ever.
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Just because a set is infinite does not mean that it will contain every possible permutation of something. That’s a common thought but a provably untrue one.
For example, there are infinite even numbers, and none of them are 3. Not a single one. If someone claimed that generating infinite even numbers would eventually return a 3, you wouldn’t take them seriously, and rightly so.
But here’s the rub: you can also generate infinite even numbers and never return a 2. Every time you generate an even number, there are infinite numbers that it could be. Even if you don’t allow numbers to repeat, it’s not like you are gonna exhaust the amount of non-2 even numbers.
Just because a set is infinite does not mean that it will contain every possible permutation of something.
So back to the typewriters. You might say that while there are infinite numbers, there are not infinite permutations of a string of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare.
And that’s true.
If you were to say that a string of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare (or longer) could never be repeated exactly, the yes they would type the works of Shakespeare.
But then they wouldn’t be typing randomly.
Randomness repeats. Infinite randomness can repeat infinitely.
And we are not dealing with strings of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare. We’re dealing with strings of characters of infinite length. And there are, in fact, infinite permutations of those.
So… Yeah.
There’s no logical basis for infinite monkeys typing infinitely, inevitably producing the works of Shakespeare. Or fecal dioramas or alternate universes where Spider-Man is real or whatever else. Doesn’t hold water.
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The funny thing is, if you truly have infinite monkeys, it doesn’t matter if they’re using it correctly or not. There is an infinite amount of them.
Some infinities are bigger than others, though.
Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven’t typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.
Cantor’s diagonalization proves it.
This is why I go online.
I’m starting a 2nd order monkey typing business attempting to use a bigger infinity of monkeys to eventually recreate the works of the first set of infinite monkeys.
Since monkeys tend to hit the same keys repeatedly, rather than trying them all out at random, I’d say your second order monkey business is actually more likely to succeed than the first set of monkeys ever typing out Shakespeare is.
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I grew up with the guy in the pic btw. He was always kinda intense.
Did he have a loicense for his screaming?
As an IT guy, there will always be a special place in my heart for the awesome person who wrote a protocol suite for this use case (it is a lot of fun to read):
There are quite a few April Fool RFCs, but this one is definitely one of my favourites. This one and RFC 1149 (A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian Carriers).
Pretty sure 1149 did actually beat Australian internet in large file transfer speed in a real test.
As the old saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a
truck full of hard drives barreling down the highwaymigrating pigeons with a SSD in claw.
Indeed. My partner wants to get into falconry, and I’m worried about my data getting encapsulated in a hawk.
I have an infinite number of rooms, so I’m putting two monkeys in each room with two typewriters.
Now I can do it in half the time.
Two new monkeys show up, and even though the infinite rooms and infinite typewriters are already occupied, you can make room for them by making all of the monkeys move over one room, and putting the new monkeys in that newly vacant room with the newly available typewriters.
Omg I just read about that the other day but I’m too stupid and forgetful… Something about the existence of inf + 1
Yeah, but since an infinite number of monkeys are working on it already, it will be just one copy for each of the infinite number of monkeys.
The monkeys now have sex with each other non stop. You’re now going at 10% of the speed you were previously.
892 trillion years sounds like a minuscule amount of time to wait for a string that long.
Like you already got unbelievably lucky.
But arent there infinite monkeys? You should have already seen it written an infinite amount of times in 892 trillion years
As written this guy only has one monkey.
Perhaps it’s in the monkey’s psychology that they’d never hit the keys that much before just destroying it all. They’re a pretty poor pick for a random value generator.
Not necessarily. There are an infinite number of positive numbers, but -13 will never be one of them. Ergo, even with infinite possibilities, you still may not see a particular combination (even if it does fit the criteria; my metaphor is imperfect).
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The defeater is each key needs to be statistically as likely as any other key to be pressed next, i.e. statistically independent events. For example after a monkey pressed S they are then just as likely to press K as W. If there is any reason they prefer a key or sequence you don’t get a normal distribution and they probably will never create any of Shakespeare’s works.
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But they still would be limited to only what monkeys can actually do with typewriters given enough time or monkeys to do everything a monkey will do with a typewriter.
Infinity only allows anything that can happen to happen no matter how unlikely to happen, but it doesn’t allow something that has 0% likelihood to happen like a monkey turning into a cup to happen. If there are any 0% probability events necessary for the task then it wouldn’t happen regardless of the number of monkeys or given time.
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Yeah I think we’re on the same page there, I was just pointing out a limitation of the thought experiment that draws attention to the fact that infinity only allows what’s improbable possible and doesn’t make the impossible possible. But yeah it doesn’t undermine the idea that introducing infinities gives unintuitive results.
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Yeah I think the recentness of formalizing infinities into math with Newton’s and Leibnez’s calculus (infinite series, limits approaching infinity) in the 1600s and Cantor’s sets (cardinality of infinite sets) in the late 1800s speaks to the difficulty of even conceptualizing the problems they introduce and the rigor needed to handle them
What? That’s not what independence means. They need to be independent, yes, because otherwise you might get into weird corner cases where the probably doesn’t converge to 1, but they don’t have to be equally likely. In fact, weighing the odds based on how often letters are used by Shakespeare should lower the expected timeframe. Heck, Shakespeare doesn’t use “J”, why would that key even be relevant? Where in the world do normal distributions even come into this? How does this comment have 4 upvotes? What am I missing here?
Those are some of the conditions necessary for the probability calculation to result in a non zero chance of writing the works of Shakespeare. From the article:
Consider the probability of typing the word banana on a typewriter with 50 keys. Suppose that the keys are pressed independently and uniformly at random, meaning that each key has an equal chance of being pressed regardless of what keys had been pressed previously. The chance that the first letter typed is ‘b’ is 1/50, and the chance that the second letter typed is ‘a’ is also 1/50, and so on. Therefore, the probability of the first six letters spelling banana is:
(1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) × (1/50) = (1/50)6 = 1/15,625,000,000.
The result is less than one in 15 billion, but not zero.
But if they weren’t independent, say every time a monkey hits b their lack of fine motor skills causes them to also hit yhb all together, then even infinite monkeys with infinite time wouldn’t be able to type banana. Or if after hitting b they keep hitting b and ignore all the other keys they would never type banana. Evenly distributed just makes sure they can hit every key, it can take some unevenness like you mentioned j and some other letters come up very rarely. But if they never hit a or e you’re never going to get Hamlet.
No, I agree that independence is necessary, not just because of “always”, but because if, as a crude example, your odds of hitting B halve each time you hit A, an infinite number of tries isn’t guaranteed to give you Shakespeare, even if the odds aren’t technically 0. My problem was that what you originally described wasn’t independence, it’s uniformity, which isn’t a prerequisite. And it’s up to 9 upvotes now so I don’t know what’s going on.
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You don’t need a normal distribution or statistical independence. It just requires that any given key combination remain possible.
No matter how unlikely, anything that is possible will eventually happen in an infinite time.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2fd66245-5a4e-48ff-a1e0-1519ac95737d
A short stay in hell
NO
DO NOT READ THIS
That which we call a gyatt by any other name would skibidi rizz just AF. No cap.
We are the monkeys.
We wrote it all.
Even Skibidi toilet.
We all evolved from monkeys, there have been millions of us, and one of us already wrote the works of Shakespear
We are evolved from a common ancestor to all great apes.
A great ape is not a monkey.
Don’t belittle your heritage or I’ll be forced to resolve this like our ancestors, by slinging feces at you until you leave.
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