41–50 of 164 posts
it was the best of times, it was the blurst of times!?!?!
Wrong writer (Dickens).
in the long-running television show The Simpsons, the industrialist Charles Montgomery Burns attempted this with multiple monkeys chained to typewriters but gave up when the best one produced was the near-Dickensian “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
yes, i understand the difference between Shakespeare and Dickens, it's a Simpsons reference to the infinite monkey theorem in play here you must be a devil with the ladies
come for the archive.is link, scroll for the pedantry
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
These Mathematicians are very selective about which aspects of the universe they want to regard and which aspects they want ignore. Like, yeah you can take an imaginary situation and imagine that it's possible, or impossible. It can go any way because it's imaginary. No need to waste time on math, you can just imagine any outcome you like. In reality, however, I think if you had a system that feeds a monkey a treat e…
ChatGPT?
Think an actual monkey might do better!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Life has had 3-4 billions years to evolve on earth. I suggest you read 'the blind watchmaker' by Dawkins to answer your other question.
You are just repeating the point that was being argued against. If the lifetime of the universe isn't enough to randomly produce Shakespeare, 3-4 billions of years are cute but useless to randomly produce anything even near as sophisticated as our 46 chromosome set. I imagine Dawkins still just repeats the conjecture "but it's 3-4 billion years, anything can happen!"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The critical difference is evolutionary only needs relatively short sequences to be randomly generated, and there’s many valid sequences. Building a book by generating a single random text string is practically impossible, but if you lock in any given word that’s correct and retry that’ll quickly get something. You’ll have most 8 letter or shorter words correct after 1 trillion runs, and many 9 letter words. It would…
The many valid sequences are relatively nothing compared to the infinitely many invalid ones, right? > You’ll have most 6 letter or shorter words correct after 1 billion tries. You think that's "quick" for dna which is made up of billions of 6-base-sequences and for a species that can only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
There’s finite invalid sequences, DNA isn’t infinitely long. It’s also not a question of valid or invalid we live with sub optimal DNA, so yea most people aren’t born with some new beneficial mutation. However, not winning the lottery isn’t the same things a dying, and even smaller wins still benefit us.
As to our long reproductive cycle, there’s a reason we share so much in common with other primates. Most of our DNA has been worked out for a long time. We share 98% of our DNA with pigs, and 85% of it is identical in mice which has practical application in drug development. Of note common ancestors were more closely related to us because both branches diverged.
Hell 60% is shared with chickens, and half of it’s shared with trees.
> only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
Many sperm and fetuses die from harmful mutations, live babies are late in the process here. Also, because order doesn’t matter you get multiple chances to roll the same sequence for every birth.
PS: There’s also quite a bit of viral insertion into our DNA, it’s mostly sexual reproduction but we have some single cell ‘ancestors’ in our recent history.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, with an infinite number of monkeys, it could happen in a finite time. As you say, this paper seems to miss the point.
It's sort of like calculating the probability of a hash collision. The speed at which the monkeys type is also a factor.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The critical difference is evolutionary only needs relatively short sequences to be randomly generated, and there’s many valid sequences. Building a book by generating a single random text string is practically impossible, but if you lock in any given word that’s correct and retry that’ll quickly get something. You’ll have most 8 letter or shorter words correct after 1 trillion runs, and many 9 letter words. It would…
The many valid sequences are relatively nothing compared to the infinitely many invalid ones, right? > You’ll have most 6 letter or shorter words correct after 1 billion tries. You think that's "quick" for dna which is made up of billions of 6-base-sequences and for a species that can only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
I dont know about the relative numbers but I don't think you do either? Are you begging the question or can you quantify?
> You think that's "quick" for dna which is made up of billions of 6-base-sequences and for a species that can only reproduce sexually once every decade or so at best?
We didn't start from scratch, we are very very late in the game, and the groundwork for us was laid by millions of other species that can replicate quickly, often very quickly.
Unless you believe the Earth is only six thousand years or so old, in which case we might as well leave the discussion where it is.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wrong writer (Dickens).
From the original mathematics paper (open access): in the long-running television show The Simpsons, the industrialist Charles Montgomery Burns attempted this with multiple monkeys chained to typewriters but gave up when the best one produced was the near-Dickensian “It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times”. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...