The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?
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.
How is this a study? It’s just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.
It’s not a “study”, it’s just 2 mathematicians having some fun. The paper is a good read, and as a math teacher I see a lot of pedagogical values in such publications.
Let’s use our braincells to fix real problems first. Like pants that don’t stretch.
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!
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they’ve missed the point.
The universe is the cage and we are the monkeys. We have already written Hamlet.
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
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.
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.
But what does the Lord think about this?
You mean the Restaurant at the End of the Universe?
Hmm… i sit corrected.
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.
Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years
That’s not bold, we’ve known how long the universe will last for decades now.
Just because someone tells you something, doesn’t mean they actually know what they’re talking about. fyi
When multiple fields of science all agree, yeah they know what they’re talking about.
I just don’t get these anti-science types…
the monkey has infinite time
Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?
As such, we have to conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently provided the answer as to whether monkey labour could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavour as a source of scholarship or creativity. To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
I prefer Romeo and Juliet, act 1 scene 1 line 41. Just because the exchange is so silly.
To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
Stealing this to be annoying with
So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is…
The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe – not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light – just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.
Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don’t imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.
With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you’ll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you’re going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham’s Number] = ∞
It’s a lot of monkeys.
Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn’t super useful unless you’re dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin’s Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn’t random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.
infinite amount of monkeys could produce infinite amount of information, i dont see the point
The original thought experiment had to do with playing around with infinity, which is a whole field of mathematics with a lot of crossover. It raises questions like whether we can assume any fixed-length sequence of digits can be found somewhere in the mantissa of a given irrational number (say, π).
What caught me out recently was infinity minus infinity.
It does not equal zero. Instead it breaks your sorting algorithm.
Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn’t become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.
I get annoyed when websites say something like, ´Using a password of this strength will take a a hacker one million years to brute force.´
No, it’ll take a million years to try every combination and permutation of allowed characters. Chances are your password will be tried much sooner than that.
And apparently
monkeyis only the 6th password attempt to try:https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_the_most_common_passwords&action=edit§ion=3
When they say such things, the are probably talking about the expected value, where those chances are taken into account, just like the number calculated in this article.
The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word “bananas” in its own lifetime.
That sounds a little low to me. B and N are right next to each other, so I’d expect them to mash left and right among similar keys a lot of the time. Then again, I think we’re expecting some randomness here, not an actual chimp at a typewriter, but that’s probably more likely to reproduce longer works than an actual chimp.
They are, however, exceptionally adept at political speechwriting.
They forgot the lifespan of the monkey, those thought experimenters.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? You stupid monkey!
Well you’re not supposed to just have one. It’s supposed to be a thousand monkies at a thousand typewriters.
Now do the Mythbusters thing and figure out how many monkies and typewriters it would take for them to write Hamlet in just under a year. Don’t just solve the myth; put it to the test!
I’m still mad we are giving them typewriters instead of keyboards. Think of the arthritis! Ergonomics please!
As well as a single monkey, they also did the calculations using the current global population of around 200,000 chimpanzees, and they assumed a rather productive typing speed of one key every second until the end of the universe in about 10100 years.
They did 200k monkeys, so a little overkill from your expectations.
What if the monkeys evolve to higher intelligence as time passes by?
Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??
You stupid monkey!
I knew this would be a waste of time! *loads gun
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
But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔
We have an infinite number of monkeys, one of them already wrote Hamlet.
The statement isn’t about “A” monkey. It’s about an infinite amount of monkeys.
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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,”
Hypothesis: every science journalist should be placed in front of a bitch-slapping machine for the rest of their career. Every time they think about writing an article, they get bitch slapped. This will greatly improve the quality of science journalism.
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
