this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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the paper used the entire population (200 thousand) and would take some 10 ^ 10 ^ 7 heat deaths of the universe
It could happen the very first time a monkey sat down at a typewriter. It's just very unlikely.
from the wiki article
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem
But not zero.
Basically nothing is ever truly zero
Someone wiser than me already said that it already has happened: 1 ape did, in fact, write the complete works of Shakespeare.
ape != monkey
apes ⊂ monkeys, actually.
monkey c monkey do
Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to insult the Librarian.
Ook
Apes are monkeys though, just like we're apes and birds are dinosaurs
We are apes and birds are dinosaurs, but monkeys and apes are distinct categories under primates so no, apes are not monkeys.
I am.
Hello "Zero"!
The probability of lots of things is zero. The probability of a monkey typing a Chinese character on an English keyboard is zero.
Similar idea: there are an infinite amount of numbers between zero and one, but none of those numbers is two.
Weird how neither of those numbers are infinities. Almost like the numbers used are unfathomably small in comparison.
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.
so you're saying there's a chance...
So you're saying there's a chance.
ok so the monkeys need to type faster
Let's put them in open spaces in offices and micro-mananage then, that'll work.
And we need more of them!
https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/images/ic/1008x567/p0gyfc9x.jpg
Irrelevant. The heat death of the universe is a constraint unrelated to the premise of the original problem.
I don't think it's a constraint, it's more like a measuring stick to try to show how ridiculously long that time is
It's really not that long, if we can't get monkeys to write Shakespeare.
We could breed monkeys to much higher populations.
If we're considering even chimps "monkeys", there's already eight billion of them, I think that's enough.
enough to cut a few zeros of a number with 10 million of them