I would argue it is conceivable that given enough time, a monkey or ape species can evolve that is intelligent enough to write Shakespeare’s full works.
Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
131–140 of 164 posts
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That’s really funny. Give the keyboard a big enough buffer to hold Shakespeare and flush it to the screen on startup. With infinite monkeys and therefore infinite buffers the monkeys don’t even have to type!
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#133Relevant incremental game: https://www.danneu.com/infinite-monkey-incremental/
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#134I am biased by my religious beliefs, but I've always struggled with the idea that abiogenesis could spontaneously occur in "just" a few billion years on earth. A few billion seems like not enough time. Even the simplest forms of life are mind bogglingly complex. Of course, it's a few billion years scaled across >1 life-friendly planets (since it only has to happen on 1 of them), but still just seems like not enough m…
This is a very computer science and not scientific response, but I look at the Game of Life, and it makes me realize that little patterns naturally form everywhere. Biology is just a little pattern that wants to replicate and survive and that doesn't have to mean intelligently.
> Biology is just a little pattern that wants to replicate and survive
I don't really see biology as being a "little" pattern. To me, looking at the jump from replicating molecules in chemical soup to single cell organisms is like looking at the jump from an abacus to an Intel i9 processor.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#135If you take it literally, there is a non-zero chance that a monkey types the entire works of Shakespeare. I mean, it has already happened: who is Shakespeare but an intelligent monkey? (don't tell the librarian...)
For that to happen again, a monkey has to evolve into an intelligent specie interested in human history, find the complete works of Shakespeare, and write it. It is more likely than using probabilistic arguments using letter frequencies, or actual monkeys[1].
[1] https://archive.org/details/NotesTowardsTheCompleteWorksOfSh...
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#136I am biased by my religious beliefs, but I've always struggled with the idea that abiogenesis could spontaneously occur in "just" a few billion years on earth. A few billion seems like not enough time. Even the simplest forms of life are mind bogglingly complex. Of course, it's a few billion years scaled across >1 life-friendly planets (since it only has to happen on 1 of them), but still just seems like not enough m…
Except abiogenesis didn't occur on Earth in few billion years, but within half to billion years after Earth was habitable. All the other features of life have taken four billion years to arise through evolution. It is like looking at current cars and wondering how they could come from nothing where had to look at the original cars and hundred years of improvement.
Abiogenesis really only need to explain how the first life arose. It could have been really simple since it got out competed by more sophisticated descendant that took over planet and left no trace of original life. We don't know how it happened, if required lots of random chance or if there was a replication step that made if go faster. We know that evolution can make complicated stuff over time.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#137I am biased by my religious beliefs, but I've always struggled with the idea that abiogenesis could spontaneously occur in "just" a few billion years on earth. A few billion seems like not enough time. Even the simplest forms of life are mind bogglingly complex. Of course, it's a few billion years scaled across >1 life-friendly planets (since it only has to happen on 1 of them), but still just seems like not enough m…
So this comes up a lot. I often think about the case of protein structures.
Let's consider a protein of 100 amino acids; although most proteins are in the 200-500 range (IIRC) it makes the maths simpler. Even for such a short sequence, the probability of coming up with one specific sequence at random is incredibly small - 20 to the power of 100 or 1.267651e+130.
The simple answer to this apparent puzzle ('how did proteins evolve from random mutations') is of course that it did not happen like this. Not at all like monkeys typing out scripts and a human checking if they have produced a Shakespeare play yet.
In fact, there are multiple solutions to the same problem - in the analogy, this would be like multiple different versions of the same play being just as good as the other. Even better for evolution, you can - in a sense - put on a version of a play that is pretty bad, but just good enough to put in front of an audience. In other words, some enzymatic functionality can be better than none.
In this way, an evolutionary system can build up complexity by making parts that are _good enough_ and are roughly equivalent to other parts that can be replaced gradually. Combine this with the massive parallelism and the scale of the molecular world, and a billion years can accomplish a lot.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds to me that the more interesting question would be graphing out the relationship of time and the amount of monkeys needed for one to write Shakespeare.
That's done in the paper. Using a log(log) scale for time, measured in number of heat deaths of the universe. It's the most amusing part of the study.
Awesome! I really should have checked the paper and skipped the article entirely.
The figure in question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#139No-one ever said it would happen within a finite time period, only that it would happen given infinite time. That’s the whole point.
Yeah exactly, it's a thought experiment about infinities... Is someone going to publish a study concluding that Hilbert's Hotel couldn't be built on Earth too? Why are people even spending money on this research? What are they trying to prove/disprove?
It's funny that so many people are confused about why this was written. The monkeys argument was originally used against the theory of evolution; "what's the probability that a monkey banging on a typewriter will type out Hamlet? It'll never happen, and that's why evolution is impossible." Then, someone made the counter-argument that given enough time, the monkey will type out Shakespeare. This paper argues that as long as the time is finite on the order of the age of our universe, the monkey will not type out Shakespeare.
Re: Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
#140[deleted]