And the study was even proven wrong in the 17th century. A finite amount of monkeys already produced Shakespeare in a finite amount of time; it took roughly 55 million years.
Source: Primates show up in the fossil records, dating to roughly 55mill years. And Shakespeare’s complete works were most likely completed by William Shakespeare, a famous decendant of said primates.
Primates ≠ monkeys
If you go back far enough they do.
We’re all apes
And apes are monkeys
If baboons and macaques are monkeys, and if howlermonkeys and spidermonkeys are monkeys, humans MUST be monkeys.
Because they can ONLY both be monkeys if their common ancestor was also a monkey and we share that very same common ancestor. In fact we are closer related to macaques and baboons than to spidermonkeys, which means we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than both us and the other old world monkeys share with the new world monkeys.
Cladistically, you can not outgrow your ancestry.
Humans are apes, apes are a subgroup of monkeys, monkeys are a subgroub of primates.
Monkeys are a social construct. Like trees.
If trees aren’t real, how can our birds be real?
…I am so sorry
Simiiformes is a clear and distinct clade.
There is no such thing for trees, because “tree” is a botanical classification, not a cladistical one.
Simiiformes is a clear and distinct clade.
Yes but who says that specific clade maps to the colloquial taxonomic word “monkey”?
Monkeys are specifically non-ape simians.
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infinite - infinite = infinite, take that infinite
This was a report for Trump supporters about how Donald xweets.
It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
Alas, not on a typewriter… Back to the drawing board!
No, the FIRST monkey to write Shakespeare used a feather and ink.
It only took a couple hundred years after all those millions for them to be written on the typewriter.
Turns out not quite. In the monkey version Hamlet says, “To be, or what.”
A property of hydrogen is that, given enough hydrogen and time, eventually it will write out the full works of Shakespeare.
This is always how I’ve chosen to interpret the expression. It’s not a theory. It’s an observation.
It’s a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it’s truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.
The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.
If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.
It can be taken in other directions too. It’s a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.
Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.
Also since it should happen once, that means that it also happens an infinite number of times, but a smaller infinity than the whole infinity.
Yeah, the point isn’t that they could write Shakespeare. But that they would write everything we could imagine + everything in between that.
It tries to explain the concept of infinity. Which is mind boggling to any human.
Did you choose to overlook my intentional usage of the word “chosen” just to mansplain something obvious? I did not make my choice out of ignorance, but I appreciate you assuming I did.
Still stuck on step 1. Get infinite monkeys.
We’re gonna need a bigger sedan…
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
You stupid monkey!
Damn. So close
Them saying that is like me saying Bizmuth isn’t radioactive because it’s half-life is many, many times longer than even the most conservative estimates for the heat-death of the universe.
In finite time that’s effectively true, because the universe itself would decay before a block of bizmuth lost any significant weight - but it isn’t physically true, because with infinite time a block of bizmuth left completely alone would evaporate away via alpha decay.
And that’s the point of infinite time - to let you throw away time and probabilities as obstacles and strictly focus on whether something could physically happen, rather than the odds of it occurring.
What part of Infinity is a mathematician, of all people, failing to comprehend? So what if it takes until cosmological decade 1,000 or 1 million or 1mil⁹⁰⁰⁰, it’s still possible on an infinite timescale, of one could devise a way for it all to survive the heat death of the universe ad infinitum.
It’s also possible that it’s not possible even on an infinite time scale. A quick example: if you asked an algorithm to choose a number, and you choose 6536639876555721, but the algorithm only chooses from the infinite number of even numbers, it will never choose your number. So for the monkeys, if they are just not ‘programmed’ to ever be able to write a whole Shakespeare play, they will not be able to even with infinite time and infinite moneys.
Except for (cosmic-) bitflips and/or evolution changing the programming
The “Infinite monkey theorem” concerns itself with Probability (the mathematical field). It has been mathematically proven that given the random input (the mathematical kind - not the human-created kind) of the monkeys, and the infinite time, the probability of the “complete works of William Shakespeare” rolling out of the typewriter in between the other random output is
1.It’s a mathematical theorem that just uses monkeys to speak to the imagination, not a practical exercise, other than to prove the maths.
You should look into another brain-breaking probability problem called the “Monty Hall Problem”. Note that some of the greatest mathematical minds of the time failed said puzzle. Switching 100% increases the chance of winning. No, it won’t guarantee a win, but it will increase your chances, mathematically.
The proof assumes that the monkeys mash the keys at random and that there is a nonzero probability to write any chunk of text appearing in Shakespeare’s works. If there is a section that the monkeys cannot generate, for example if we removed the letter ‘e’ from their typewriter, the monkeys will never write the complete works of Shakespeare regardless of the amount of time spent on it, so their point still stands and it depends on the assumptions you make about the monkey typists’ typing skills.
The probability is 1 but that does not mean that it will happen. There is a set of options where it does not happen. It happens “almost surely”.
Yeah I get that, what I’m arguing is that monkey input != random input. Therefore the probably is not 1.
And the Monty Hall problem is really cool, and yes, I’ve seen it before, but it doesn’t have anything to do with this one.
Disagree. Within the confines of the thought experiment the monkeys are working with the standard alphabet and punctuation. There’s no reason to assume that they would never use the letter t or something like that, especially given the infinite time scale.
I see what you’re saying, but I do think they would have behavioral ‘rules’ that would stop them even on an infinite time scale. It would work if monkeys were capable of pressing one letter at a time, walking away, and pressing another letter and so forth… and while that’s of course physically possible for the monkeys to do, I don’t think it’s actually possible because they are susceptible to their own behavior. Not saying they would never type one specific letter, but a better example would be the behavior of rolling their finger/hand while pressing a letter, such that a conglomeration of letters are pressed in a way that would never match a Shakespeare play.
The problem is that you’re underestimating infinity then. If it only happens 1 in 1000000000000^10000 times but there’s an infinite number of attempts over an infinite amount of tine, it’s still bound to happen eventually.
No, I’m saying it’s not just improbable (if it were improbable, then yes, it would happen), I’m saying it’s impossible because of behavior.
As a small example, let’s say you wanted to type the ABC’s. However, every time you typed, your finger slid to press the key next to it as well. Then, no matter how many times you tried, you would never be able to type the ABC’s. That’s an exaggerated example of what I believe the monkeys would do. They simply would not be able to type letters at random. The way they work, they would be forced to mush buttons that do not allow for whole words.
If there was another scenario where there were about 30 boxes (one for each letter and any punctuation needed), and the monkey had to get a banana from one of the boxes, and that is what ‘typed’ the script, then yes, an infinite number of monkeys would be able to type Shakespeare. But because it’s a typewriter, I don’t think even an infinite amount would be able to.
No. If a monkey inherently NEVER, EVER hits one key at a time, then I gu3ss that scenario would make it impossible but that’s just stating that something is impossible in the first place and doesn’t affect the actual thought experiment in any way. Assuming that the typing monkeys literally ever have the possibility of only hitting one key at a time, no matter how many times they press two keys at a time and type nonsense, they will eventually and necessarily, bc of the definition of infinity, type Shakespeare. I don’t know how I can explain this better but I’ll try later when I have some time.
The theorem is only true if monkeys are random. But monkeys are not random, and therefore this cannot be proved true using monkeys.
Hell, infinite monkeys over a finite amount of time or finite monkeys over an infinite amount of time does the trick.
I was about to say…
An infinite amount of monkeys could (depending on how you make the rules) write Shakespeare within a second.
if each monkey just has to type one letter on a page and you just take a group of monkeys in a long line and you read each letter on the line you would read Shakespeare. It would be done in a second.
I have read the paper, the news make it seem like something that is not. It’s a tough experiment and mostly a joke. From the paper closing remarks:
Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation. As such, we have to conclude that Shakespeare himself inadvertently provided the answer as to whether monkey labour could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavour as a source of scholarship or creativity. To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: “No”.
I’m not terribly bright, but I’ve never understood the original statement.
If I bash my right hand on a typewriter an infinite number of times, that will never turn into the complete works of Shakespeare. If we assume a monkey will enter one random letter at a time, that probably would, but that is a big assumption that a monkey would be actually random.
I welcome the visual once BBC realises the limit as k goes from 0 to pos infinity, of sum n=0 to k, for (1 / (1 + n)) actually converges and has a real solution.
This is the researcher
infinite monkey theorem relies on the assumption that infinite banana theorem is valid
‘If infinite monkeys type everyday they might accidentally write Hamlet the play. But they’ll probably just shit on it and throw it away; in the infinite monkey cage!
But monkeys never ask questions.
Science has yet to determine if monkeys would be able to type “wherefore art thou Romeo?”
They already have, we evolved from a species you could colloquially refer to as monkeys. The ancestors of those monkeys went on to write Shakespeare
We evolved from the same species as monkies did, not from monkeys. They weren’t actually monkeys until they were already very far removed from us. However, given that we are apes and thus there was at some point a human ancestor species that was ape and was not human the rest of that is right. Off the top of my head that species would probably be our last common ancestor with other apes.
See definition for colloquial
Back in my IT support days, IPX routing had a “Count to Infinity” problem when the number of hops between sites went above 15. We used to joke that this made 16 “Infinity”.
Being nerds at the time, we did napkin math to prove the Shakespearian Monkey Quotient was 256cmy (combined monkey years) for “Hamlet”.
Combined Monkey Years just aren’t the same since their lead singer left, I’m hoping they improve eventually.
Don’t worry, the reunion tour is in 35cmy
