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Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

theguardian.com

51–60 of 164 posts

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#53
They have arbitrarily shifted the goal posts to fit their conclusion:

> working out that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never

Who assumed the original adage had the constraint of the universe’s lifetime.

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!"

A work of Shakespeare is a single specific target, that's why it takes so long to hit it - one letter out doesn't cut it. DNA meanwhile is a general purpose animal kit that has many billions of 'correct answers'. It's not about sophistication.

it's not about the absolute number of correct answers

it's about the ratio of valid / invalid answers

which is somewhere very close to 0

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#55

No-one ever said it would happen within a finite time period, only that it would happen given infinite time. That’s the whole point.

Flawed point if it is used to justify the random speciation of evolution. If they can't type out shakespeare, how can evolution randomly yet correctly type out billions of base sequences of dna in just a cple mil yrs?

There's no evolutionary pressure to type out Shakespeare.

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#56
post #15
post #13

A monkey with keyboard already wrote Shakespeare, duh. Other monkeys called it Shakespeare.

I somehow doubt Shakespeare had access to a typewriter...

Someone really needs to go dig up his bones and give him a typewriter. Too bad Halloween was yesterday.

\s

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#58

No-one ever said it would happen within a finite time period, only that it would happen given infinite time. That’s the whole point.

Along an infinite timeline more than one big bang may arise.

Yeah, but now you have another problem: the universe must reinvent monkeys.

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#59
The theorem is called "infinite monkey theorem". That means infinite amount of time. A googol years is not infinite, it's infinite times smaller than that. In an infinite amount of time they will write Shakespeare works (if they type randomly enough and not with some bias like never typing certain combinations of letters)

Also, at least the article could have said what the actual probability is then? Are we talking 1e-500, 1e-1000000, 1 / googolplex, or what?

EDIT: of the above examples 1e-1000000 is the closest I think (in order of magnitude of exponent), based on something like 30^5000000 divided through some amount of years assuming ~5 characters per word. So perhaps "If every atom in the universe was a universe in itself" won't get us there, but recursively repeat that process a million times and we do get there

Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds

#60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's sort of like calculating the probability of a hash collision. The speed at which the monkeys type is also a factor.

How fast do monkeys type?

Just give them a typewriter that records the position of where the key is pressed to a million bits accuracy, convert that to a series of ASCII characters (through a hash function), and the monkeys will type very fast.
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