this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (2 children)

How about 4 monkeys in parallel?

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

Yes, and add an Agile framework. Extreme Monkey typing.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Switch to AMD. More monkeys.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago (3 children)

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is...

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe -- not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light -- just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don't imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you'll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you're going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham's Number] = ∞

It's a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn't super useful unless you're dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin's Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn't random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

What caught me out recently was infinity minus infinity.

It does not equal zero. Instead it breaks your sorting algorithm.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Oh yeah? Name ONE ape that wrote Shakespeare. Go on I’ll wait

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago

This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I always heard that it was an infinite number of monkeys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago (5 children)

I feel like there has to be more to this problem than pure probability. We ought to consider practical nuances like the tendency to randomly mash keys that are closer together rather than assume a uniform distribution.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Who are you, who is so wise in the ways of science?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

I've read there are so many permutations of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, that in all the times decks have been shuffled through history, there's almost no chance any given arrangement has ever been repeated. If we could teach monkeys to shuffle cards I wonder how long it would take them to do it.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 month 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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

This is a false flag study to undermine public support for mathematics research!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

What if it's a smart monkey?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago
[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Abiogenisis in shambles again

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