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

theguardian.com

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

#121

Post by _blk »

umvi wrote: post #113

I 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…

I don't think religion has anything to do with it. Statistics and increasing entropy. Now, where you go from there might take you to religion, and so I'd argue that modern science often has arguably more to do with the religion of atheism than with reason since it's mostly based on certain axioms. I'm not saying we can't derive science off of theories, but as long as the bases are only asserted, you can derive proofs to come to any conclusions and speaking up about this seems to quickly get you disqualified in academia.

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

#122

Post by chasd00 »

thih9 wrote: post #11
andrewstuart wrote: post #4

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.

The paper doesn’t say that either. They only call the original theorem misleading. I understood that their point is the same as yours - that infinity won’t happen in a finite time period. > The long-established result of the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is correct, but misleading. > Non-trivial text generation during the lifespan of our universe is almost certainly impossible. > The Finite Monkeys case shows there will n…

I don’t see how the original is misleading. The word “infinite” isn’t hidden or anything… unless the definition of infinite is misleading but I think it’s use here is pretty clear.

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

#123

Post by _blk »

TeaBrain wrote: post #115
soco wrote: post #13

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

Apes aren't monkeys.

Indeed - that fact was already established 17 years ago ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--szrOHtR6U

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

#124

Post by chasd00 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #64
jdthedisciple wrote: post #17

Earlier 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…

Also wouldn’t a DNA sequence get more likely as time goes on as it builds from the past and is not uniformly random? In the mokey/typewriter thought experiment no previous correct keystroke makes the next keystroke more likely to be correct. However, with DNA/life once it starts the next iteration is more likely to be better since it has the previous success to build upon.

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

#125

Post by eth0up »

Granted, the schedule is of maximum generosity. But does it not seem unfair to ask a monkey to compose the entire works of Shakespeare, considering Shakespeare himself might have been incapable of such a feat?

And while it may take an army of them, we know these creatures are at least capable, collectively, of operating the Daily Mail, which is still all pretty early given the time remaining.

My fingers are crossed and I still have hope

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

#126

Post by jjk166 »

I mean this is a really simply thing to work out. There are 30^n strings of length n that can be made by mashing a 30 key keyboard. The time to the heat death of the universe is 10^100 years which is approximately 30^72 seconds. Your odds of getting a string of length n in the lifetime of the universe is

( number of monkeys * typing rate in characters per second * 30^72 ) / 30^n

The authors plugged in 200,000 (=30^3.5) and 1, meaning their odds are 30^75.5 / 30^n = 30^(75.5-n)

For a string of less than 69 characters, the odds are fantastic. For a string of more than 82 characters the odds are abysmal. At 69 the odds of the substring existing are roughly equivalent to losing the lottery, and at 82 the odds are equivalent to winning the lottery.

Shakespeare's shortest sonnet, 126, is a string of 533 characters.

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

#127

Post by lucianbr »

umvi wrote: post #113

I 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…

> A few billion seems like not enough time.

Where would you get an intuition about how much time a billion years is? Or for what is "mind boggingly complex" and what not? How many eons have you lived? People who claim it is possible have better arguments than "to me it seems". Do you have a number for "this would seem to me as enough time"?

Do you also struggle with the idea of a poll being close to the truth when done on a sample of 1000 persons, out of tens or hundreds of millions? Math and science are often not intuitive. But they work.

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

#128

Post by jdthedisciple »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #89
jdthedisciple wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 guara…

>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. Why would it have to re-occur again and again? If the mutation is beneficial to the reproductive success of an organism, by definition their mutation will be passed on with no need for it to occur again by chance. The percentage of the population with…

> Why would it have to re-occur again and again? If the mutation is beneficial to the reproductive success of an organism, by definition their mutation will be passed on with no need for it to occur again by chance.

Are you certain this is correct? An individual with a genetic mutation does not necessarily pass it down to its offspring, even if it was beneficial, in my understanding. So there is a probability p of passing it down and 1-p of not doing so.

In the latter case, the beneficial mutation is lost. Now the way evolutionists seem to "solve" this is by conjecturing that since the mutation is beneficial, it will arise in multiple individuals independently and eventually get passed down. Even if I grant this, it makes the statistics once again much more unlikely for this to occur.

> The predictions of evolution are generally supported by the available evidence at any rate ...

Depends which subarea of evolution. No actual speciation based on random mutation has ever been observed (let alone ones predicted by evolution) as far as I'm aware.

Micro-evolution or expression of previously not-expressed but already present genes is a different topic, and not something I have issues with.

All I say is evolution is at best insufficient to explain us. And we haven't even touched consciousness.

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

#129

Post by asynchronous »

_blk wrote: post #121
umvi wrote: post #113

I 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…

I don't think religion has anything to do with it. Statistics and increasing entropy. Now, where you go from there might take you to religion, and so I'd argue that modern science often has arguably more to do with the religion of atheism than with reason since it's mostly based on certain axioms. I'm not saying we can't derive science off of theories, but as long as the bases are only asserted, you can derive proofs…

Frustrating that we’ve seem to built thousands of assumptions on an unproven base.
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