Technology

How is the infinite monkey theorum "misleading". It's got "infinite" in the name. If you're applying constraints based on the size or age of the universe, you are fundamentally misunderstanding the thought experiment.

This is clownery, humanity is infinite monkeys, and we wrote Hamlet ages ago.

But we aren't talking about one monkey. We are talking about infinite monkeys.

Infinity is already a loaded concept in our universe.

So, while the Infinite Monkey Theorem is true, it is also somewhat misleading.

Is it though? The Monkey Theorem should make it understandable how long infinity really is. That the lifetime of the universe is not long enough is nothing unexpected IMHO, infinity is much (infinitely) longer. And that's what the theorem is about, isn't it?!

There's still a chance that a monkey will type it on the first attempt. It's just very small.

Lifetime of the universe is infinitely less than infinite time. So they solved for the wrong problem. Of course it may take longer than the life of the universe, or it may happen in a year. That's the whole point of the concepts of infinity and true randomness. Once you put a limit on time or a restriction on randomness, then the thought experiment is broken. You've totally changed the equation.

How is this a study? It's just basic probability on a bogo sort style algorithm.

Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn't become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.

OK, what about 2 monkeys?

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times? You stupid monkey!

Well you're not supposed to just have one. It's supposed to be a thousand monkies at a thousand typewriters.

Now do the Mythbusters thing and figure out how many monkies and typewriters it would take for them to write Hamlet in just under a year. Don't just solve the myth; put it to the test!

The statement isn't about "A" monkey. It's about an infinite amount of monkeys.

Abiogenisis in shambles again

So the secret to this thought experiment is to understand that infinite is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is...

The lifespan of the universe from big bang to heat death (the longest scenario) is a blink of an eye to eternity. The breadth and size of the universe -- not just what we can see, but how big it is with all the inflation bits, even as its expanding faster than the speed of light -- just a mote in a sunbeam compared to infinity.

Infinity itself looks flat and uninteresting. Looking up into the night sky is looking into infinity – distance is incomprehensible and therefore meaningless. And thus we don't imagine just how vast and literally impossible infinity is.

With an infinite number of monkeys, not only will you get one that will write out a Hamlet script perfectly the first time, formatted exactly as you need it, but you'll have an infinite number of them. Yes, the percentage of the total will be very small (though not infinitesimally so), and even if you do a partial search you're going to get a lot of false hits. But 0.000001% of ∞ is still ∞. ∞ / [Graham's Number] = ∞

It's a lot of monkeys.

Now, because the monkeys and typewriters and Shakespeare thought experiment isn't super useful unless you're dealing with angels and devils (they get to play with infinities. The real world is all normal numbers) the model has been paired down in Dawkin's Weasel ( on Wikipedia ) and Weasel Programs which demonstrate how evolution (specifically biological evolution) isn't random rather has random features, but natural selection is informed by, well, selection. Specifically survivability in a harsh environment. When slow rabbits fail to breed, the rabbits will mutate to be faster over generations.

That's because they only considered one monkey.

You need a thousand monkeys working at a thousand typewriters.

There was a plank computer post here last couple of days. It showed an atomic sized computer performing one crack attempt every 10^-44 seconds would take a 95 character alphabet 100 years to crack a 121 character password.

Monkeys take up 1m^3. 10^105 bigger than a plank length. Typing 120wpm is 10^43 slower. Ignoring punctuation and spaces and capitalization, a 26 character alphabet allows for about 52 more characters than a 95 character alphabet.

Bottom line, monkeys can't come anywhere close to being able to crack a 100 character password from a 26 character alphabet.

How about 4 monkeys in parallel?

But what if we had infinite monkeys 🤔

I've read there are so many permutations of a standard deck of 52 playing cards, that in all the times decks have been shuffled through history, there's almost no chance any given arrangement has ever been repeated. If we could teach monkeys to shuffle cards I wonder how long it would take them to do it.