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Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy (mander.xyz)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 7 points 2 years ago (9 children)

Disagree. Within the confines of the thought experiment the monkeys are working with the standard alphabet and punctuation. There's no reason to assume that they would never use the letter t or something like that, especially given the infinite time scale.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (8 children)

    I see what you're saying, but I do think they would have behavioral 'rules' that would stop them even on an infinite time scale. It would work if monkeys were capable of pressing one letter at a time, walking away, and pressing another letter and so forth... and while that's of course physically possible for the monkeys to do, I don't think it's actually possible because they are susceptible to their own behavior. Not saying they would never type one specific letter, but a better example would be the behavior of rolling their finger/hand while pressing a letter, such that a conglomeration of letters are pressed in a way that would never match a Shakespeare play.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (7 children)

    The problem is that you're underestimating infinity then. If it only happens 1 in 1000000000000^10000 times but there's an infinite number of attempts over an infinite amount of tine, it's still bound to happen eventually.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    No, I'm saying it's not just improbable (if it were improbable, then yes, it would happen), I'm saying it's impossible because of behavior.

    As a small example, let's say you wanted to type the ABC's. However, every time you typed, your finger slid to press the key next to it as well. Then, no matter how many times you tried, you would never be able to type the ABC's. That's an exaggerated example of what I believe the monkeys would do. They simply would not be able to type letters at random. The way they work, they would be forced to mush buttons that do not allow for whole words.

    If there was another scenario where there were about 30 boxes (one for each letter and any punctuation needed), and the monkey had to get a banana from one of the boxes, and that is what 'typed' the script, then yes, an infinite number of monkeys would be able to type Shakespeare. But because it's a typewriter, I don't think even an infinite amount would be able to.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago* (5 children)

    No. If a monkey inherently NEVER, EVER hits one key at a time, then I gu3ss that scenario would make it impossible but that's just stating that something is impossible in the first place and doesn't affect the actual thought experiment in any way. Assuming that the typing monkeys literally ever have the possibility of only hitting one key at a time, no matter how many times they press two keys at a time and type nonsense, they will eventually and necessarily, bc of the definition of infinity, type Shakespeare. I don't know how I can explain this better but I'll try later when I have some time.

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  • [–] 0 points 2 years ago (4 children)

    The theorem is only true if monkeys are random. But monkeys are not random, and therefore this cannot be proved true using monkeys.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 years ago (3 children)

    Luckily this isn't a mathematical problem, and we don't need to prove it to be true. Something can be true without being proven.

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