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Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
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Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#72How long would it take a computer or set of computers to pick random characters and generate the complete work how long for 1 paragraph how long for 1 page how long for 1 chapter etc etc Does it get harder/slower by a factor? would be an interesting exercise
Yes? The scaling factor is 2^(number of bits).
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
You're comparing chalk and cheese to an extent, a perfect copy of Shakespeare's work can exist in exactly one way but DNA isn't required to be copied perfectly, DNA can change without necessarily killing the organism or otherwise rendering it unable to reproduce. Additionally evolution is not a random process, while mutations are random the process by which the mutations are selected is not - it depends on whether th…
I would like to see someone use the most generous parameters possible and simulate the statistics of the first cple amino acids evolving into our homo sapiens sapiens chromosome set randomly over the course of just 4b years.
(selection is irrelevant here; we could even just model it as always-select-for-beneficial-mutation for extra graciousness).
Mind you, even if a beneficient mutation occurs, it is still not guaranteed to be passed onto the next generation. It would have to randomly occur over and over again.
I'm not confident that it's gonna be very convincingly in favour of the random mutation model.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#74In other news - Life expectancy of the universe is finite
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#75Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#76How long would it take a computer or set of computers to pick random characters and generate the complete work how long for 1 paragraph how long for 1 page how long for 1 chapter etc etc Does it get harder/slower by a factor? would be an interesting exercise
So let’s say we’ve got 28 possible characters (alphabet + period + space), you have a 1/28 chance of getting the first character right. So it follows that a string of length n is (1/28)^n because you have to hit each character correctly in a row. If we can do x guesses a second, and we know on average how many tries it takes on average to get our string right (28^n), we can divide and get an estimate of time. Though we could do it faster, or slower depending on our luck.
With multiple searchers it’s trickier, but we use the probability complement (probability of all possible events must add to 100%) to figure out the chances that our searchers all miss, and subtract that chance by 1. This gives the chance of at least one agent getting it right. Two searchers looks like 1-(27/28)^2 for the first char, and you can follow the same logic for any length string.
Your answer will heavily depend on your assumptions - how fast the computers guess, what they can guess, etc. But searching in parallel would speed things up dramatically. If you had like 100 computers searching simultaneously, 3 or 4 would likely get the first char right every time, giving you a big speed up on the problem.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#77The 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 1…
Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales.
The point is that there isn't enough time in the universe for all the random stuff to happen that scientists pin on random chance. The theorem was memorable, but a cop out.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#78In other news - Life expectancy of the universe is finite
I mean, in several models, including the current most-likely one (last I heard) it effectively is finite. Eventually no new planets or stars can get created, and then some time after that, no atoms can exist.
Will the "universe" exist after that? Kind of a philosophical question, but nothing interesting will exist _in_ the universe.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#79The 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 1…
Yes, but the theorem is meant to explain what can happen in the universe over long time scales. The point is that there isn't enough time in the universe for all the random stuff to happen that scientists pin on random chance. The theorem was memorable, but a cop out.
Perhaps not in our observable universe, but in the space of all possible physics that could take place and / or beyond the observable universe if it actually is infinitely big there, perhaps it can? (as in, anything can happen, there will be copies of the Earth with subtle differences somewhere there, Boltzmann brains appearing purely out of quantum fluctuations, etc...)
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#80What if something in monkey psychology causes them to hit the keyboard with their fist or palm every five minutes or so of typing? What if they regularly lapse into just pressing one key over and over? It seems very unlikely to me that even with infinite monkeys a work would be generated, because they're not actually random number generators.