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 was an ape
He wrote it in the wrong order tho
Mind. Blown.
What if you could math the monkeys?
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.
Most people don’t get the thought experiment at all.
I’ve seen 300+ deep comment chains on reddit with people arguing bitterly back and forth if a monkey could even operate a typewriter, and how it’s absolutely impossible to get monkeys to type out a book, etc, etc, etc.
I hate it here.
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.
You could get the same result throwing an infinite number of typewriters down an infinitely long mineshaft, but there will be even fewer people who would understand it 😭
Worse, creationists use the “watch maker’s paradox” as evidence of creation. Same idea but watch parts in a washing machine.
I have argued with plenty of theists, they tend to cherry-pick parts of every idea to validate their extreme fear of death/God, so they hyper-fixate on the idea that “fantastic things” can happen with infinities, without addressing the problems that also come from infinities.
The idea behind the monkeys/typewriters thought experiment is to highlight just how problematic actual infinities would be in our universe, it’s an argument against things like gods occuring, because in an infinite, unbounded universe there would be an infinite number of infinitely powerful beings negating each other all out over large enough scales.
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.
Given long enough periods of time, if your typewriters were magically immune to entropy, they would eventually start quantum teleporting into each other, and eventually would accidentally create perfect clockwork mecha-godzilla made entirely out of typewriters.
If you’re talking magical, biologically accurate monkeys, then they will eventually shit out models of every scene of your life, replicated in perfect detail in monkey feces. Not just once, but an infinite number of times, and also in every possible configuration your life may have ever existed in, every choice you could have made. An infinite number of times.
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.
I disagree and have also done plenty of reading on the topic.
I don’t disagree to say that “you’re wrong and even wild silly things are possible!” but I’m saying that it’s a lot more accurate to say that we don’t know what real-world systems can and cannot do. Your model is from a pure mathematical and physical point of view, which would be correct. But we don’t know if our knowledge of quantum mechanics and physics broadly is even complete (probably not) so I have grown quite fond of the far more succinct answer of “I don’t know.”
Generally people get really invested in this because it either validates or invalidates some belief, mystical or material, about the universe, but I don’t think it’s an answerable question until we find out if infinities can even exist in a tangible way. Most likely not, at least in our limited understanding.
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.
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.
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).
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.
That which we call a gyatt by any other name would skibidi rizz just AF. No cap.
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/2fd66245-5a4e-48ff-a1e0-1519ac95737d
A short stay in hell
NO
DO NOT READ THIS
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.
Is that an actual sentence?
