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Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
- dijksterhuis 2y agolink to paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...
- 082349872349872 2y agoThe basic point is an exercise in at least one older freshman text (Kittel & Kroemer?) but at least this paper does go on beyond and finds some strings (eg "I chimp, therefore I am") that are likely to be typed before the heat death of the universe, if not before extinction of chimpanzees.
- Fricken 2y agoThese Mathematicians are very selective about which aspects of the universe they want to regard and which aspects they want ignore. Like, yeah you can take an imaginary situation and imagine that it's possible, or impossible. It can go any way because it's imaginary. No need to waste time on math, you can just imagine any outcome you like. In reality, however, I think if you had a system that feeds a monkey a treat every time it strikes a letter key that corresponds to the next letter in a Shakespere play displayed on a monitor, you would eventually have some Shakespeare typed out by a monkey. One could also just have a monkey mash keys for a while, and then after removing all the unnecessary letters you'd be left with a Shakespearian play. Or, with a group of monkeys and plenty of time one could use natural selection to evolve them into a literate species that could handle the task easily. This is the method currently in use for the typing of Shakespeare. It has already been done, many times over.
- andrewstuart 2y agoNo-one ever said it would happen within a finite time period, only that it would happen given infinite time. That’s the whole point.
- kypro 2y agoYeah 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?
- stavros 2y ago> Why are people even spending money on this research? What are they trying to prove/disprove? That it takes much fewer than infinite humans and infinite time to produce the most pedantic paper possible.
- SalmonSnarker 2y ago> Why are people even spending money on this research? "This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors."
- dcminter 2y agoIt's just barely possible that this is not an entirely serious paper. Scientists like to have fun too, you know? Not to mention that frivolous research has been known to pay surprising dividends.
- hermitcrab 2y agoMaybe they are after an Ig Nobel prize?
- jessekv 2y agoI suspect that many academic papers are a petty move to win an argument that started one day over lunch.
- soco 2y agoA monkey with keyboard already wrote Shakespeare, duh. Other monkeys called it Shakespeare.
- vardump 2y agoI somehow doubt Shakespeare had access to a typewriter...
- bluGill 2y agoSomeone really needs to go dig up his bones and give him a typewriter. Too bad Halloween was yesterday. \s
- 082349872349872 2y agopedantry: that monkey was ~250 years before keyboards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Hansen_Writing_Ball https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typewriter#Hansen_Writing_Ball
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- hugh-avherald 2y agoHurdy gurdys with keyboards have been around long before then.
- 082349872349872 2y agoIf you try to write Shakespeare with hurdy-gurdy keys, you're going to get slightly abridged versions, like that famous tragedy A ad Ceaa, or the comedy Ced f E. Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHxfOZH8cew https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHxfOZH8cew
- Aerroon 2y agoIn other words: it's "easier" to make better monkeys than to scale up to produce something valuable. Or in other other words: random generation is highly unlikely to produce something valuable. Or in other other other words: the amount of useful information in "the library of babel" is miniscule compared to noise.
- The_Blade 2y agoit was the best of times, it was the blurst of times!?!?!
- hermitcrab 2y agoWrong writer (Dickens).
- The_Blade 2y agoyes, i understand the difference between Shakespeare and Dickens, it's a Simpsons reference to the infinite monkey theorem in play here you must be a devil with the ladies
- dangsux 2y ago[dead]
- 23B1 2y agocome for the archive.is link, scroll for the pedantry
- bananaflag 2y agotheguardian has no paywall
- 23B1 2y ago< slow clap >
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agonew HN game: predict which order the archive.is link or pedantry comes in. if you get the order right, you get one point. if you get sucked into a pedantic argument, you lose
- 2y ago
- jajko 2y agoBut universe as we understand it is endless / infinite on time scale, no? [1] has some nice projections how even basic quantum stuff eventually breaks down, yet nothing is really ending, if you don't count matter as we know it. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- jackstraw14 2y agohttps://libraryofbabel.info/ https://libraryofbabel.info/ it's all there regardless
- creativenolo 2y agoThey 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.
- sa1 2y agoJust read the paper directly: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632.... They do no such thing.
- creativenolo 2y agoYes, and no… > Here, we consider the Finite Monkeys Theorem and look at the probability of a given string being typed by one of a finite number of monkeys within a finite time allocation consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe But point taken, the article is sensationalizing.
- sa1 2y agoFinite Monkeys Theorem is not the same as the Infinite Monkeys Theorem
- v8xi 2y agoIn graduate school we had to answer this on a test question and it took all of 5 minutes...should have published it, I guess
- warhorse10_9 2y agoI was going to say, we went over this in undergrad Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics.
- qarl 2y ago200,000 is quite a bit smaller than infinite.
- unyttigfjelltol 2y agoClearly not infinite monkeys or infinite time. If either were truly infinite not only would this be possible, it would be mandatory and would occur infinite times.
- prophesi 2y agoSounds 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.
- hanche 2y agoThat'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.
- prophesi 2y agoAwesome! I really should have checked the paper and skipped the article entirely. The figure in question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014#fig0001 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...
- chasd00 2y agoKind of embarrassing to even be in this thread spending time here but would it not also be probable, however unlikely, to never get the full works of Shakespeare?
- ImPostingOnHN 2y agoWith fixed tries/time, or without true randomness, yes. With infinite tries/time and true randomness, no.
- Aardwolf 2y agoThe 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
- petercooper 2y agoYeah, I might be naive, since they're professional mathematicians and I'm not, but their conclusion feels like saying that they "tested" the concept of infinity and found that it's simply unreachable. To me, the infinite monkey theorem is an abstract idea and not something that needs to be "tested", though it's certainly fun to run the numbers.
- sa1 2y agoThey didn't "test" the concept of infinity. They said that the results of the infinite monkey theorem are well known, and they wanted to see what happens in the finite case.
- InfiniteRand 2y agoReminds me of Archimedes calculating the number of grains of sand to fill the universe
- Digory 2y agoYes, 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.
- minkeymaniac 2y agoHow 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
- Filligree 2y agoYes? The scaling factor is 2^(number of bits).
- proteal 2y agoSo 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.
- nachox999 2y agowe need more monkeys
- shagie 2y agoI was recently reminded of The Codeless Code. In that set of stories, there's the Laughing Monkey Clan. http://thecodelesscode.com/names/Laughing+Monkey+Clan http://thecodelesscode.com/names/Laughing+Monkey+Clan Specialists in the business tier, where monkey business usually happens. Members of this clan have a traditional fighting style which involves throwing wrenches at their opponents; this is tolerated because it is not the worst thing that Monkeys have been known to throw. There is a theory that a finite number of Laughing Monkeys pounding away randomly at a finite number of keyboards will eventually get a clean compile. The existence of the Standard PHP Library would seem to imply that this has already happened. I recommend reading from the start ( http://thecodelesscode.com/case/1 http://thecodelesscode.com/case/1 ) and checking the links (since they sometimes have background information - http://thecodelesscode.com/names/Elephant%27s+Footprint+Clan http://thecodelesscode.com/names/Elephant%27s+Footprint+Clan ) and remembering image mouseovers.
- marcosdumay 2y agoThat's only worth mentioning because the PHP stdlib is mostly written in C. The general proposition (for any language) is trivially true since 93% of ink blobs are valid Perl programs. https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/ https://www.mcmillen.dev/sigbovik/ (And wow! Search engines are getting even less useful with time. It's incredible!)
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- th0masfrancis 2y agoIn other news - Life expectancy of the universe is finite
- kadoban 2y agoI 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.
- thom 2y agoWhat 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.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoIf you had infinite monkies, what is the probability that one of them is actually a random number generator In the set of all infinite monkies there are infinite monkies that are random number generators
- thom 2y agoI believe that probability could plausibly be zero.
- bluefirebrand 2y agoOn an infinite scale it seems unlikely that the probability of anything is actually zero Near zero, certainly, but not actually zero
- thom 2y agoI think the number of things that are impossible is far greater than the number of things that are possible, even in an infinite universe.
- hanche 2y agoOh, but these are idealized monkeys that act like perfect random generators. Almost, but not quite, unlike spherical cows.
- anon291 2y agoWas this seriously a question? I mean, this is something a college student or advanced high schooler could calculate. The law of large numbers is still correct. Nowhere is there a requirement that the large numbers be smaller than the various physical constants of the universe.p
- tombert 2y agoWhat kind of "study" would this even be? I thought the point of the infinite monkey thing was to talk about regular distributions and eventualities of every possible string showing up. I don't think anyone claimed that any relatively-long string would show up in any reasonable amount of time necessarily, but it's kind of a bizarre assertion to make. It's sort of like stating the runtime efficiency of a Bogosort; the runtime efficiency is unbounded. Theoretically any list could be sorted on the first run, but it could also just keep sorting in an unbounded fashion for forever, though given enough time (which could be tens of trillions of years or longer), it will eventually be sorted if we assume regular distribution of random numbers. ETA: Ok, I read through the actual paper, and it's clearly meant more as a joke, which I don't think was made clear in this article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...
- atoav 2y agoI think it is even worse: infinite instances of bogosort are 100% guarantueed to finish instantly, because we are running in parallel here and the ones that are unbounded don't matter at all when at least one of then gets it right. And given the fact that there is a non-zero chance of bogosort getting it right first try, means it there are infinite bogosort instances getting it right first try. This is also true for the infinite typing monkeys: one of them is getting it right by chance, unless that chance is 0 (and it isn't).
- innagadadavida 2y agoEmpirically a monkey did already creat the works of Shakespeare in a mere 13billion years. This is the time it took for the universe to form, earth to evolve to create a monkey that could write all those words down. The entire process from start to finish is way more complicated and random than anyone typing 26 character randomly into the keyboard. But I guess we are talking about uniform distributions here.
- gred 2y agoThis sequence replaces an infinite God with ~infinite time and then draws the wrong conclusion.
- zen928 2y agoYou're replacing a hypothetical situation meant to illustrustrate mathematics with something else. The monkeys don't eat, evolve, age, conspire, have agendas or agency, they type randomly as a means to invoke visual imagery of a monkey slamming it's hands down ignorantly on a typewriter. It's chaotic slamming is the "input" that gets eventually distributed in different ways, one of which, if given enough time, will be identical to shakespeare. Assuming implications to theology or genetic sequencing where none were given is a reflection of your ability to handle rational discussion of the material.
- gred 2y agoThis sub-thread moved on from the original hypothesis as soon as innagadadavida put forward his non-empirical empirical example. Take it up with him, he may also enjoy your evaluation of his rationality.
- skybrian 2y agoIt can happen a lot faster with a rigged random number generator: https://www.pcg-random.org/party-tricks.html https://www.pcg-random.org/party-tricks.html
- chasd00 2y agoI thought the saying was “infinite monkeys..” and in that case you would get the full works of Shakespeare immediately. With an infinite amount of time and one monkey you’d get the full works of Shakespeare in every language supported by the typewriter any number of times in a row you wished. In fact, you’d get anything you wanted as long as the probability was > 0 Edit: after walking my dogs, isn’t the probability of the full works of Shakespeare never being typed out also > 0? (I can’t believe I’m actually spending calories on this..)
- midiguy 2y agoI'm picturing scientists in another universe clenching their butts as the monkey goes to type the last letter of Hamlet..... and misses 't' for 'r' and the whole observation hall erupts with loud groans
- BugsJustFindMe 2y ago> isn’t the probability of the full works of Shakespeare never being typed out also > 0? No
- littlekey 2y agoAnd wouldn't you also get the next work Shakespeare would have written if he hadn't died/retired first? Fun to consider.
- netsharc 2y agoNot the point of the article, but this got me curious... > Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them banana. If this article (1) is accurate, Shakespeare never even knew what a banana is, and he never tried it, since he died ~2 decades before they came to England: > England got its first glimpse of the banana when herbalist, botanist and merchant Thomas Johnson displayed a bunch in his shop in Holborn, in the City of London, on April 10, 1633. (1) https://theconversation.com/the-day-bananas-made-their-british-debut-94742 https://theconversation.com/the-day-bananas-made-their-briti...
- ribcage 2y agoThe universe would die of shame right now if it knew it's humans are spending their time questioning garbage like this.
- matt_kantor 2y agoNext someone will publish a study finding that spherical cows can't survive in the real world.
- lindbergh 2y agoMore details on the math related to it than you'd like : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjcacSB6_EE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjcacSB6_EE
- umvi 2y agoI 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 monkeys and typewriters in the given timeframe to produce something as astonishingly complex as life, let alone Shakespeare.
- gleenn 2y agoThis 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.
- umvi 2y ago> 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.
- zimpenfish 2y ago> the jump from an abacus to an Intel i9 processor Call it 75 years (1942 - before electronic computers to 2017 - first i9) which is about 39M minutes. Assume human innovation can work on an minutely cycle[0] and you've got 39M iterations from "no electronic computers" to "Intel i9". I'd put decent money on there bring several orders of magnitude more chemical reactions than that per second in the primordial soup (good conditions for fast reactions and there was A LOT of it.) And it had about half a billion years (fifteen quadrillion, seven hundred seventy-eight trillion, eight hundred billion seconds) to cook before things really started happening. Statistically, it was likely. [0] Obviously optimistic but giving parallelism a chance.
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- nopelynopington 2y agoSurely it depends on the calibre of monkey we deploy
- eth0up 2y agoGranted, 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
- jjk166 2y agoI 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.
- Iwan-Zotow 2y agoBring more monkeys!
- superjan 2y agoI 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.
- hombre_fatal 2y agoRelevant incremental game: https://www.danneu.com/infinite-monkey-incremental/ https://www.danneu.com/infinite-monkey-incremental/
- GuB-42 2y agoIf 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/NotesTowardsTheCompleteWorksOfShakespeare https://archive.org/details/NotesTowardsTheCompleteWorksOfSh...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- appden 2y ago> even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe Seems to me like a flawed “study” if the baseline assumption is that chimpanzees would type randomly even when given lifespans through the heat death of the universe, which is estimated at 10^100 (googol) years!
- calibas 2y agoActually, the study doesn't say that it wont happen, but that there's a 6.4 * 10^-7228454 chance of it happening before the Universe ends. That's an infinitely larger chance than 0!