The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
How is this a study? It’s just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.
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.
This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.
How about 4 monkeys in parallel?
Switch to AMD. More monkeys.
So, while the Infinite Monkey Theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.
Is it though? The Monkey Theorem should make it understandable how long infinity really is. That the lifetime of the universe is not long enough is nothing unexpected IMHO, infinity is much (infinitely) longer. And that’s what the theorem is about, isn’t it?!
Except the lifetime of the universe is quite small when compared to infinity, so it doesn’t really convey how large infinity is because it’s so much more.
They don’t convey the same information.
Infinity isn’t really an amount of something.
> typeof Infinity 'number'Riddle me that, smart guy.
The statement isn’t about “A” monkey. It’s about an infinite amount of monkeys.
And an infinite amount of time.
This “rebuttal” is forced contrarianism. It’s embarrassing.
A thought experiment has rules, you can’t just change them and say the experiment doesn’t make sense…
The other part of it is there’s not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there’s two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.
And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes
Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds
And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe
And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete
that’s the point of the thought experiment
For what it’s worth, it seems like it’s this “journalist” trying to make a sensational headline
The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality
“We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,”
This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.
Really, it just takes an infinite amount of monkeys one time.
I always heard that it was an infinite number of moneys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.
Their assumptions must be wrong. They do not account for the most basic principle of the universe, “the show must go on.”
Strong entry for an Ig Nobel Prize if nothing else.
Alright then. 2 monkeys… 3? 4? The answer has to be a number lol.
Well it isn’t 6.
From Wikipedia:
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
Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that
42 monkeys?
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??
You stupid monkey!
I can’t remember the author or title, but that was the idea for a story I once read.
God sends an angel and the monkeys to do the job. They get close, but when the angel is doing the final read through he sees "…to be, or not to beee, Damn the ‘E’ key is sticking. " And they have to start over
I knew this would be a waste of time! *loads gun
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!
the monkey has infinite time
Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.
It also makes a pretty bold claim about us actually knowing the lifespan of the universe.
How are they defining the end of the universe?
The universe is believed to end just a few nanoseconds before a monkey finishes writing Hamlet.
Probably very shortly after dinner has been served at that restaurant.
I think that was just a galaxy, not the whole universe.
You mean the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Hmm… i sit corrected.
But what does the Lord think about this?
Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years
We know such an infinitesimally small amount about what is actually happening in the universe that any claims to be capable of predicting it’s end are patently absurd.
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.
I think the implications behind there being infinite time in the past are fun if you assume that the universe works like a stochastic state machine. It means that either every finite event that has happened and will happen has already happened an infinite number of times or the universe is infinitely large.
Infinite time is perfectly defined, it just doesn’t exist in our universe
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Why must the concept of time before the big bang (or after our heat death) exist in our physical reality for us to speculate about theoretical infinities past those? The thought experiment is about infinite time, not all the time in our limited universe. A lot of things happen at infinity that break down as soon as you add a limit, but we’re not talking limits when we’re talking infinity.
If a tree folds in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it make a sound?
For this experiment scientists recruited Gilbert, no one really pays much attention to him, and it’s assumed the universe won’t either.
