this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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Yeah, it always seems that every time someone questions the wisdom or validity of this analogy seems not to understand it.
It's either the misunderstanding that the constraints of the hypothetical are finite (a million vs. infinity).
Or the insistence that any sufficiently infinitesimal chance is "practically zero", when literally any likelihood multiplied by infinity is going to guarantee an occurrence.
You can actually expand the infinite monkey theory to say that an infinite number of monkeys using typewriters for an infinite amount of time would write every single book ever written in any language the keyboard is capable of typing, as well as every possible book that could ever even theoretically exist, an infinite number of times, and still be correct.
Any infinite set of random (or even semi-random) characters will contain every possible set of characters that could ever exist, of any length. The works of Shakespeare are also encoded into Pi, we just haven't calculated enough digits to discover one yet (and very likely never will).