The entire thing is utterly ridiculous. The meme is infinite monkeys.
The mathematician said, “But what if it was 200k monkeys?”
Reporters claim mathematician proved infinite monkeys meme is wrong.
200,000 does not equal infinite!
The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of “infinite monkeys”. An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it’ll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don’t even need the infinite time.
It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.
And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There’s no infinite time.
What part of Infinity is a mathematician, of all people, failing to comprehend? So what if it takes until cosmological decade 1,000 or 1 million or 1mil⁹⁰⁰⁰, it’s still possible on an infinite timescale, of one could devise a way for it all to survive the heat death of the universe ad infinitum.
I have read the paper, the news make it seem like something that is not. It’s a tough experiment and mostly a joke. From the paper closing remarks:
Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation. 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”.
It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
This is always how I’ve chosen to interpret the expression. It’s not a theory. It’s an observation.
A property of hydrogen is that, given enough hydrogen and time, eventually it will write out the full works of Shakespeare.
And the study was even proven wrong in the 17th century. A finite amount of monkeys already produced Shakespeare in a finite amount of time; it took roughly 55 million years.
Source: Primates show up in the fossil records, dating to roughly 55mill years. And Shakespeare’s complete works were most likely completed by William Shakespeare, a famous decendant of said primates.
Primates ≠ monkeys
If baboons and macaques are monkeys, and if howlermonkeys and spidermonkeys are monkeys, humans MUST be monkeys.
Because they can ONLY both be monkeys if their common ancestor was also a monkey and we share that very same common ancestor. In fact we are closer related to macaques and baboons than to spidermonkeys, which means we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than both us and the other old world monkeys share with the new world monkeys.
Cladistically, you can not outgrow your ancestry.
Humans are apes, apes are a subgroup of monkeys, monkeys are a subgroub of primates.
Monkeys are a social construct. Like trees.
Ð ſtu̇dı ƿėz t ſı ƿėt tuımfreım Shakespeare kᵫd huıpėþetikėlı imṙdj ovṙ. Ð rizu̇ltſ ſu̇djeſt ðæt enı givin mu̇nkı ƿᵫd nıd ė greıtṙ ėmaunt v tuım ðæn ðeıṙ ƿᵫd bı u̇ntil hıt deþ t prėduſ ıvin ė rekėgnuızėbėl ėmaunt v Shakespeare.
spoiler
The study was to see what timeframe shakespeare could hypothetical emerge over. The results suggest that any given monkey would need a greater amount of time than there would be until heat death to produce ecen a recognizeable amount of Shakespeare.
Bro. I like the idea of introducing non-latin characters into the English alphabet, but holy shit that’s basically unreadable lmao.
English is long overdue for a spelling reform, but just taking all fancy looking characters from other germanic languages is not the way
ſ z ð onlı ƿėn frėm ėnėðṙ djṙmænik leıŋgwidj, æ İURK, it hæz bin Yuzd i Iŋglic.
spoiler
ſ is the only one from another germanic language, and IIRC, it has been used in English.
Just thinking at a high level, an infinite number of monkies should hypothetically almost instantly produce Shakespeare (or at least as quickly as they can type)
Conversely, 1 monkey would eventually produce it given infinity time.
So as weird as it sounds not all infinities are equal. For example there is an infinite set of odd numbers. That set will never include the number 2 though.
