The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

    • Yaysuz@lemm.ee
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      16 minutes ago

      It’s not a “study”, it’s just 2 mathematicians having some fun. The paper is a good read, and as a math teacher I see a lot of pedagogical values in such publications.

  • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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    3 hours ago

    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.

  • style99@lemm.ee
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    1 hour ago

    This sort of study shows you more how mathematicians think than how science or philosophy works.

  • shrugs@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    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?!

    • Todd Bonzalez@lemm.ee
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      3 hours ago

      And an infinite amount of time.

      This “rebuttal” is forced contrarianism. It’s embarrassing.

      A thought experiment has rules, you can’t just change them and say the experiment doesn’t make sense…

      • Konstant@lemmy.world
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        34 minutes ago

        How would monkeys type through infinite. Don’t they stop, are they not mortals like normal monkeys?

      • funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works
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        2 hours ago

        The other part of it is there’s not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there’s two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.

        And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes

        Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds

        And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe

        And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete

        that’s the point of the thought experiment

      • ozymandias117@lemmy.world
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        2 hours ago

        For what it’s worth, it seems like it’s this “journalist” trying to make a sensational headline

        The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality

        “We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,”

  • samus12345@lemmy.world
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    2 hours ago

    I always heard that it was an infinite number of moneys, not just one. So one of them might get the job done in time.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
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      4 hours ago

      I can’t remember the author or title, but that was the idea for a story I once read.

      God sends an angel and the monkeys to do the job. They get close, but when the angel is doing the final read through he sees "…to be, or not to beee, Damn the ‘E’ key is sticking. " And they have to start over

    • bstix@feddit.dk
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      1 hour ago

      Well it isn’t 6.

      From Wikipedia:

      In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website. Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter “S”,the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine

      Mike Phillips, director of the university’s Institute of Digital Arts and Technology (i-DAT), said that the artist-funded project was primarily performance art, and they had learned “an awful lot” from it. He concluded that monkeys "are not random generators. They’re more complex than that