If the monkeys were truly infinite would time even matter? For any set of monkeys that could write Hamlet within a year there’s an infinite number of duplicate sets, so they could do as much writing in one day as the original set would do over the age of the universe.
Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy
Kolanaki@yiffit.net 1 week ago
As I pointed out elsewhere about this: it also is based entirely on probability, like cracking encryption. It could take longer than the universe will be around. But there’s also the possibility they write Hamlet within a year because they got lucky.
absentbird@lemm.ee 1 week ago
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
You don’t get to pick and choose! You get infinite monkeys. What’s all this about duplicate sets? Sounds like somebody is trying to bring in a ringer! That’s cheatin!
Malgas@beehaw.org 1 week ago
The point is there’s no statistical difference between rolling one die an infinite number of times, rolling an infinite number of dice once, and rolling an infinite number of dice an infinite number of times.
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
My comment was made in jest, I don’t actually believe this person was trying to “cheat” on the thought experiment by selecting only smart monkeys lol.
Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 week ago
That’s the thing about infinity. If you have infinite monkeys, you don’t have to choose. You’ll have infinite instances of every possibility.
Finding any of the monkeys that typed out something interesting (or did something interesting that wasn’t typing or more common interesting monkey stuff) is another issue. If there’s an 0.0000001% of something interesting and unusual happening by coincidence, then there will be 999,999,999 uninteresting or usual instances for each interesting and unusual one.
Now if there were infinite copies of you searching the infinite monkeys for interesting and unusual events and all interesting ones get sent to an email address, the email server would overload in about the time it takes for the quickest interesting thing to happen, be noticed, and reported.
millie@beehaw.org 1 week ago
Considering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren’t Hamlet? I’m honestly not fully convinced that you’d necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.
absentbird@lemm.ee 1 week ago
There aren’t an infinite arrangements of keystrokes that are the length of Hamlet and aren’t Hamlet. Hamlet is 191,726 characters long, it’s like guessing a password.
44 keys on a typewriter, 191726 characters, makes 44^191726 or about 4.054 × 10^315094 combinations.
millie@beehaw.org 1 week ago
You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.
An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat the same pattern more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.
If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter is.
You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
if it’s infinite monkeys then an infinite amount of them do it correct on the first try
JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 week ago
That’s assuming they’re typing truly randomly. Which is a fair assumption.
BluesF@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Not necessarily. Each monkey is independent, right? So if we think about the first letter, it’s either going to be, idk, A, the correct letter, or B, any wrong letter. Any monkey that types B is never going to get there. Now each money independently chooses between them. With each second monkey, the chances in aggregate get smaller and smaller than we only see B, but… It’s never a 0 chance that the monkey hits B. If there’s only two keys, it’s always 50/50. And it could through freak chance turn out that they all hit B… Forever. There is never a guarantee that you will get even a single correct letter… Even with infinite monkeys.
I get that it seems like infinity has to include every possible outcome, because the limit of P(at least one monkey typing A) as the number of monkeys goes to infinity is 1… But a limit is not a value. The probability never reaches 1 even with infinite monkeys.
lemonmelon@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The birthday problem fits into this somehow, but I can’t quite get there right now. Something like an inverse birthday problem to illustrate how, even though the probability of two monkeys typing the same letter rises quickly as more monkeys are added to the mix, and at a certain point (n+1, where n is “possible keystrokes”) it is inevitable that at least two monkeys will key identically, the inverse isn’t true.
If you have 732 people in a room, there’s no guarantee that any one of them was born on August 12th.
There’s another one that describes this better but it escapes me.
ChairmanMeow@programming.dev 1 week ago
That’s not true. Infinite doesn’t mean “all”. There are an infinite amount of numbers between 0 and 1, but none of them are 2. There’s a high statistical probability, sure, but it’s not necessarily 100%.
Dagrothus@reddthat.com 1 week ago
It is necessarily 100%. That’s the whole idea behind infinity. There is a 0% chance of rolling a “2” because it’s outside the bounds of the question. Theres a 0% chance of the monkeys typing in chinese too.
BluesF@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No, it isn’t, that’s a misunderstanding of how independent random variables behave. Even with an infinite number of trials, there is never a guarantee that any particular outcome will happen.
Consider a coin flip, 50/50 chance of either getting heads or tails on each flip. Lets say we do an infinite number of flips, one by one, so that we end up with an infinite ordered set of outcomes, like so: {H, T, T, H, … }. Now, consider the probability of getting a particular arrangement of heads/tails in this infinite list, like the one I wrote before. You can’t calculate a probability for each arrangement - there are an infinite number - but it should be clear that each arrangement is equally likely, right? Because {H, …} is just as likely as {T, …}, same with {H, H, …} and {H, T, … } and so on and so on. In other words the probabilty of getting all heads on infinite coin flips is the same as the probability of getting any other combination.
In the same way, the infinite monkeys are doing ‘coin flips’ involving more than 2 options. Lets just assume they have 26 keys, one for each letter, and assume they hit each of them with equal probability. In the same way, for an individual monkey the probability of going {a, a, a, a, a, a, …, a} is the same as the probability of the same sequence with hamlet somewhere (in a particular position that is - the probabilities are only equal when we consider exactly one arrangement). What might make it more intuitively clear is that even after an infinite number of trials you only have one sequence of letters (or set of sequences, with infinite monkeys). It’s clear that there are other possible sequences - like only the letter a - and these all have a non 0 chance of having arisen given a different infinite set of monkeys for a different infinite time period.
It’s easy to be misled here! If we return to the coin flip example, the probability of flipping at least 1 head after infinite coin flips approaches 1. The limit of P(at least one H) as the number of flips approaches infinity is 1. But this is a limit! You never reach the limit, even considering infinite situations.