4 ms·
If at the end Shakespeare-level literature is produced, does it matter whether we arrived there by random keystrokes?
by whatever1 3mo ago
If at the end Shakespeare-level literature is produced, does it matter whether we arrived there by random keystrokes?
- voidhorse 3mo agoYes because the keystrokes aren't free and the world is finite. We need to pay these monkeys in bananas.
- qjack 3mo agoThe problem is the infinite other literature produced along the way. It doesn't work to throw more monkeys at the problem of verification, and checking for matches against existing Shakespeare plays is cheating.
- subygan 3mo agodon't worry, we can get another swarm of random monkeys typing and decide what ones to eliminate . tijebs gi yo,
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- confidantlake 3mo agoYes because it is akin to producing a universe of slop and trying to find the single atom of gold.
- w-ll 3mo agoShakespeare-level literature was produced. We are the infinite monkeies, and one was shakespeare.
- timacles 3mo agoHow much slop you figure Shakespeare produced?
- mock-possum 3mo agoHonestly judging from the volume of his output, a ton. It’s rare to run into prodigious artists who simply produce a few perfect pieces - as a rule those few magnum opuses are built on a hill of cutting room floor scraps.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoThe director James Cameron stands out because he has only produced huge box office hits. Extremely hard to do like you said, and most artists and auteurs would be happy to have one great work they can be remembered for, even if it's amidst a dozen forgettable pieces.
- patmorgan23 3mo agoHe's only published blockbuster hits. But I'm sure he has lots of practice films that have never seen the light of day?
- peter_stokes 3mo agoSometimes the forgettable pieces come later. In JC's case, that's Avatar 2
- archonis 3mo agoDon't let your personal love of Piranha II convince you that it was a box office hit.
- hexaga 3mo agoAnd then there are those like J.S. Bach.
- timacles 3mo agoI don’t know how to feel about HN thinking one of the greatest artist of all time produced slop. You guys really think Leonardo davinci was drawing ladies with 6 fingers before the Mona Lisa? I assure the worst of Shakespeares work is far beyond anything most writers can produce, much less the incoherent slop LLMs generate
- gopalv 3mo ago> does it matter whether we arrived there by random keystrokes? Douglas Adams said this beautifully in the Campaign for Real Time & the poet Lallalfa. And I just found out h2g2.com is no longer online, so no reference.
- gritzko 3mo ago2*128 is the UUID namespace, which is astronomical. That is like 21 letters. Making one sentence of Shakespeare by random search is strictly 0% chance. SHA256 is ~43 letters then. "LLM broke all of cryptography and creates random data to fit a hash" -- are we there yet? Random search does not work at this scale. In all their cases, they played with pre-existing well-studied software, so they had an embedded fitness function. An extremely detailed one. Monkeys have been reading Shakespeare all their lives (training). Effectively, this is LLM uncompression. Hence, "in Rust, from nothing but its documentation" -- not entirely true.
- sawyers 3mo agoWhat embedded fitness fuctions are you thinking of?
- grey-area 3mo agoAnd if in the end it does not produce masterworks, going faster and breaking things will be seen as a huge and credulous waste of time that poisoned the internet and some codebases beyond redemption. But I’m glad someone else is running all these experiments so we can see who is right in their guess about the outcome.
- sawyers 3mo agoRight. The joke with shakespeares monkeys or borjes library is that you just do that and then filter out the books that match shakespeares works. If you already know what you want in an infinite library, it is there. If you don't know exactly what you're looking for to the letter, you might not be able to find it.
- gedy 3mo agoYes, because the folks waiting slack-jawed for the monkeys to finish will no longer have the skills or discernment to know what Shakespeare looks like.
- altmanaltman 3mo agoYes it will be a terrible waste of time since dedicated humans can do it faster and produce better stuff. I would prefer literature created like that instead of just random monkeys writing what they don't understand. We also lose the ability for writers and creators to get better at their craft and produce unique works instead of just randoming spamming keys for millions of years