How is this a study? It's just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.
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How is the infinite monkey theorum "misleading". It's got "infinite" in the name. If you're applying constraints based on the size or age of the universe, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the thought experiment.
This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.
How about 4 monkeys in parallel?
Switch to AMD. More monkeys.
So, while the Infinite Monkey Theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.
Is it though? The Monkey Theorem should make it understandable how long infinity really is. That the lifetime of the universe is not long enough is nothing unexpected IMHO, infinity is much (infinitely) longer. And that's what the theorem is about, isn't it?!
Except the lifetime of the universe is quite small when compared to infinity, so it doesn't really convey how large infinity is because it's so much more.
They don't convey the same information.
Infinity isn't really an amount of something.
> typeof Infinity
'number'
Riddle me that, smart guy.
The statement isn't about "A" monkey. It's about an infinite amount of monkeys.
And an infinite amount of time.
This "rebuttal" is forced contrarianism. It's embarrassing.
A thought experiment has rules, you can't just change them and say the experiment doesn't make sense...
The other part of it is there's not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there's two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.
And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes
Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds
And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe
And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete
that's the point of the thought experiment
For what it's worth, it seems like it's this "journalist" trying to make a sensational headline
The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality
"We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,"
This must be a very important question to whoever keeps funding these studies.
Really, it just takes an infinite amount of monkeys one time.
I always heard that it was an infinite number of moneys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.
Their assumptions must be wrong. They do not account for the most basic principle of the universe, "the show must go on."
Strong entry for an Ig Nobel Prize if nothing else.
Alright then. 2 monkeys... 3? 4? The answer has to be a number lol.
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
42 monkeys?
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times??
You stupid monkey!
I can't remember the author or title, but that was the idea for a story I once read.
God sends an angel and the monkeys to do the job. They get close, but when the angel is doing the final read through he sees "...to be, or not to beee, Damn the 'E' key is sticking. " And they have to start over
I knew this would be a waste of time! *loads gun
The theorem holds true. The theorem states that the monkey has infinite time, not just the lifetime of our universe.
That's just lazy science to change the conditions to make sensational headlines. Bad scientists!
the monkey has infinite time
Use an infinite number of monkeys instead?
This just in: scientists disprove validity of thought experiment; philosophers remain concerned that they've missed the point.
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.
They forgot the lifespan of the monkey, those thought experimenters.
I have a way to make it work.
Have the monkey write down a single character. Just one. 29/30 of the time, it won't be the same character as the first one in Shakespeare's complete works; discard that sheet of paper, then try again. 1/30 of the time the monkey will type out the right character; when they do it, keep that sheet of paper and make copies out of it.
Now, instead of giving a completely blank sheet to the monkey, give them one of those copies. And let them type the second character. If different from the actual second character in Shakespeare's works, discard that sheet and give him a new copy (with the right 1st char still there - the monkey did type it out!). Do this until the monkey types the correct second character. Keep that sheet with 2 correct chars, make copies out of it, and repeat the process for the third character.
And then the fourth, the fifth, so goes on.
Since swapping sheets all the time takes more time than letting the monkey go wild, let's increase the time per typed character (right or wrong), from 1 second to... let's say, 60 times more. A whole minute. And since the monkey will type junk 29/30 of the time, it'll take around 30min to type the right character.
It would take even longer, right? Well... not really. Shakespeare's complete works have around 5 million characters, so the process should take 5*10⁶ * 30min = 2.5 million hours, or 285 years.
But we could do it even better. This approach has a single monkey doing all the work; the paper has 200k of them. We could split Shakespeare's complete works into 200k strings of 25 chars each, and assign each string to a monkey. Each monkey would complete their assignment, on average, after 12h30min; some will take a bit longer, but now we aren't talking about the thermal death of the universe or even centuries, it'll take at most a few days.
Why am I sharing this? I'm not invalidating the paper, mind you, it's cool maths.
I've found this metaphor of monkeys typing Shakespeare quite a bit in my teen years, when I still arsed myself to discuss with creationists. You know, the sort of people who thinks that complex life can't appear due to random mutations, just like a monkey can't type the full works of Shakespeare.
Complex life is not the result of a single "big" mutation, like a monkey typing the full thing out of the blue; it involves selection and inheritance, as the sheets of paper being copied or discarded.
And just like assigning tasks to different monkeys, multiple mutations can pop up independently and get recombined. Not just among sexual beings; even bacteria can transmit genes horizontally.
Already back then (inb4 yes, I was a weird teen...) I developed the skeleton of this reasoning. Now I just plopped the numbers that the paper uses, and here we go.
I feel like you might have interviewed for Google in the late 2000s
Among other problems, this fails to account for non-typing activities performed by the monkey, such as damaging the typewriter or attacking the researcher.
285 years increases to a few thousand if you alarmingly frequently have to clean the contents of a monkey's colon out of a typewriter.
And at some point you'd want to further "refine" your selection process by "repairing" the typewriter to have fewer keys and/or causing the typewriter to jam after the required key press. Monkeys like to press the same key over and over again. Good luck getting them to stop once they've pressed a key once.
TL;DR monkeys are chaos, and this will not be easy.
I think the point is less about any kind of route to Hamlet, and more about the absurdity of infinite tries in a finite space(time). There are a finite (but extremely large) number of configurations of English characters in a work the length of Hamlet. If you have truly an infinite number of attempts (monkeys, time, or both are actually infinite) and the trials are all truly random (every character is guaranteed to have the same chance as every other) then you will necessarily arrive at that configuration eventually.
As far as your process, of procedurally generating each letter one by one until you have the completed works, we actually have a monkey who more or less did that already. His name is William.