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Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds (www.theguardian.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Two Australian mathematicians have deemed it misleading, working out that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never pen the works of the bard.

all the chimpanzees in the world

infinite monkeys

I'm glad they had fun doing some math, but this is not news, nor is the original saying misleading. With an infinite number of monkeys, a smaller-yet-still-infinite number of them would produce the works of Shakespeare. The reason this saying works is because of the concept of infinity, not some random finite number.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago

Your argument sounds convincing, but given an infinite number of monkeys I could refute it

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

You can write down an infinite amount of numbers without ever leaving [0, 1]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

No they couldn't. They'd die before they finished.