Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds

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• echodot@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  If a tree folds in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it does it make a sound?

  For this experiment scientists recruited Gilbert, no one really pays much attention to him, and it’s assumed the universe won’t either.

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• communism@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Fuuuuck there goes my plan to get this monkey to write Hamlet within the lifetime of the universe…

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• aleonem@lemmy.today ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  What if it’s a smart monkey?

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  • humorlessrepost@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Of our sample size, 100% of “smart” (capable of symbolic language) monkey species have already written Hamlet.

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• ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Really, it just takes an infinite amount of monkeys one time.

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• Mac@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Semi related:
  Here’s a link to the Library of Babel website

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• NineMileTower@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

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

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• paysrenttobirds@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  I wonder if it would take more or less time with auto-complete.

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• vane@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Maybe it’s becaue scientists have very poor imagination of the universe.

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• 5in1k@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Seems to not understand the thought experiment which is a way to contemplate infinity.

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• Clinicallydepressedpoochie@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Their assumptions must be wrong. They do not account for the most basic principle of the universe, “the show must go on.”

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• ContrarianTrail@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ 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.

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• Brkdncr@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Are spelling and punctuation expected to be accurate?

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• Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Wait …is this why AI exists? So we can type Hamlet in the face of monkey failures?

  Dude. Just use a printer.

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  • actually@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Omg I just realized AI is the new monkeys… that is disturbing

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• LovableSidekick@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  If we could teach monkeys to shuffle cards I wonder how long until they reproduce a deck that’s already happened.

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  • hardcoreufo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    There are 8.0658*10^67 orders you can shuffle a card deck in.

    The math is easy. It’s just 52! if your calculator has that function which is really 525150…32*1. There are 52 possibilities for the first card 51 for the second since you’ve already used one card and so on.

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• TheObviousSolution@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  They are, however, exceptionally adept at political speechwriting.

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• Jubei_K_08@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.

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• Skoobie@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Alright then. 2 monkeys… 3? 4? The answer has to be a number lol.

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  • r4venw@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    42 monkeys?

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  • bstix@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Well it isn’t 6.

    From Wikipedia:

    In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

    Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that

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• Autocheese@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Infinity sorts it out for you, Karl

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• nednobbins@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  In other news, exponents make things big.

  Any time you have an X>1 and a big n, X^n gets huge.

  X=26 (if we ignore punctuation, spaces, and capitalization).
  N=130,000

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• Bookmeat@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  Duh.

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