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

  • @PetteriPano
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    452 hours 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!

    • Ogmios
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      81 hour ago

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

      • @scarabic
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        21 hour ago

        How are they defining the end of the universe?

        • Ogmios
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          215 minutes ago

          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.

        • @HonoraryMancunian
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          113 minutes ago

          Heat death would be my assumption, so between about 10^100 and 10^106 years

    • @scarabic
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      1 hour 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.

    • @Botzo
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      15 minutes ago

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

  • @Kethal
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    113 minutes ago

    Use infinite monkeys.

  • @[email protected]
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    239 minutes ago

    I just listened to a podcast about assembly theory and I think that it kind of relates here too, though maybe not. If we start randomly generating text that is the lenght of the Hamlet, then Hamlet itself would be one of the possible, finite number of possibilities that could be generated within these parameters. Interesting theory nevertheless.

    If we think about a screwdriver, the theory would argue that it couldn’t simply appear out of nowhere because its structure is too specific and complex to have come into existence by chance alone. For that screwdriver to exist, a multitude of precise processes are required: extracting raw materials, refining them, shaping metal, designing the handle, etc. The probability of all these steps happening in the right order, spontaneously, is essentially zero. Assembly theory would say that each stage in the creation of a screwdriver represents a selection event, where choices are made, materials are transformed, and functions are refined.

    What makes assembly theory especially intriguing is that it offers a framework to distinguish between things that could arise naturally, like a rock or even an organic molecule, and things that bear the hallmarks of a directed process. To put it simply, a screwdriver couldn’t exist without a long sequence of assembly steps that are improbable to arise by chance, thereby making its existence a hallmark of intentional design or, at the very least, a directed process.

  • Lvxferre
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    224 minutes ago

    I have a way to make it work.

    Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won’t be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare’s complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.

    Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare’s works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.

    And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.

    Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let’s increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to… let’s say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it’ll take around 30min to type the right character.

    …not really. Shakespeare’s complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.

    But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare’s complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren’t talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it’ll take at most a few days.


    Why am I sharing this? I’m not invalidating the paper, mind you, it’s cool maths.

    I’ve found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can’t appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can’t type the full works of Shakespeare.

    Complex life is not the result of a single “big” mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.

    And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.

    Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen…) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.

  • Ech
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    172 hours ago

    it is also somewhat misleading

    …what? No it isn’t. Restricting the premise from infinite to any finite amount of time completely negates it. That doesn’t prove it’s “misleading”, it proves anyone that thinks it does has no idea what they’re talking about.

    • @AbouBenAdhem
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      458 minutes ago

      Not with a typewriter, though.

  • @AbouBenAdhem
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    253 hours ago

    Yeah, that’s why we need at least… two of them.

    • Eager Eagle
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      2 hours ago

      the paper used the entire population (200 thousand) and would take some 10 ^ 10 ^ 7 heat deaths of the universe

      • Nougat
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        212 hours ago

        It could happen the very first time a monkey sat down at a typewriter. It’s just very unlikely.

          • Nougat
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            172 hours ago

            … the probability of the monkeys replicating even a single page of Shakespeare is unfathomably small.

            But not zero.

            • @CeeBee_Eh
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              22 hours ago

              Basically nothing is ever truly zero

              • Nightwatch Admin
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                152 hours ago

                Someone wiser than me already said that it already has happened: 1 ape did, in fact, write the complete works of Shakespeare.

          • @scarabic
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            21 hour ago

            So you’re telling me… there’s a chance!

            Sorry, I’m sort of lampooning comments like the one above and below you where people just can’t resist focusing on the possibility, no matter how ridiculously remote it seems. For myself, there’s a point of “functionally zero odds” that I’m willing to accept and move on with my life.

      • Rimu
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        52 hours ago

        ok so the monkeys need to type faster

        • Lvxferre
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          123 minutes ago

          If we’re considering even chimps “monkeys”, there’s already eight billion of them, I think that’s enough.

  • Eager Eagle
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    123 hours ago

    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”.

    • subignition
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      62 hours ago

      To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.

      Stealing this to be annoying with

  • @Brkdncr
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    32 hours ago

    Are spelling and punctuation expected to be accurate?

      • Pennomi
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        11 hour ago

        He’s probably got a dumb name, like Bill or Willie.

        • Lvxferre
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          121 minutes ago

          Perhaps even worse: Wobblesticke, Jiggleweapone, stuff like this.

  • @NineMileTower
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    52 hours ago

    Let’s use our braincells to fix real problems first. Like pants that don’t stretch.

  • @Autocheese
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    11 hour ago

    Infinity sorts it out for you, Karl

  • Maxnmy's
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    63 hours ago

    I feel like there has to be more to this problem than pure probability. We ought to consider practical nuances like the tendency to randomly mash keys that are closer together rather than assume a uniform distribution.