• neidu2@feddit.nl
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    1 month ago

    And the study was even proven wrong in the 17th century. A finite amount of monkeys already produced Shakespeare in a finite amount of time; it took roughly 55 million years.

    Source: Primates show up in the fossil records, dating to roughly 55mill years. And Shakespeare’s complete works were most likely completed by William Shakespeare, a famous decendant of said primates.

      • Enkrod@feddit.org
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        1 month ago

        If baboons and macaques are monkeys, and if howlermonkeys and spidermonkeys are monkeys, humans MUST be monkeys.

        Because they can ONLY both be monkeys if their common ancestor was also a monkey and we share that very same common ancestor. In fact we are closer related to macaques and baboons than to spidermonkeys, which means we share a more recent common ancestor with old world monkeys than both us and the other old world monkeys share with the new world monkeys.

        Cladistically, you can not outgrow your ancestry.

        Humans are apes, apes are a subgroup of monkeys, monkeys are a subgroub of primates.

  • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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    1 month ago

    The entire thing is utterly ridiculous. The meme is infinite monkeys.

    The mathematician said, “But what if it was 200k monkeys?”

    Reporters claim mathematician proved infinite monkeys meme is wrong.

    200,000 does not equal infinite!

    • xantoxis@lemmy.world
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      1 month ago

      The whole thing is dumb if you accept a premise of “infinite monkeys”. An infinite number of monkeys will type the works of shakespeare immediately, because an infinite number of them will start with the very first key they hit and continue until the end. (So it’ll be complete exactly as fast as a monkey can type it, typing as fast as simianly possible, with no mistakes.) You don’t even need the infinite time.

      It only becomes interesting if you look at the finite scenarios.

      And BTW, the lifespan of the universe is finite due to the eventual decay of all matter, including the monkeys and the typewriters. There’s no infinite time.

      • Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        A more interesting calculation the mathematician should have done is how many monkeys are needed to write Shakespeare in the lifespan of the universe rather than starting with 200k.

        • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          I don’t think there is a finite number of monkeys that would be guaranteed to do so in the lifespan of the universe.

          Best we could do is calculate the expected number of monkeys it would take, assuming accurate probabilities, which I also don’t think is possible to determine.

          You can’t just take one divided by the number of possible characters that could be typed because monkeys can do many things other than typing away. A high portion of them would likely instead destroy the typewriter. In the infinite monkeys scenario, an infinite amount would destroy their typewriter in the middle of Hamlet’s to be or not to be soliloquy.

          Plus the odds of it actually happening are going to be so astronomically low that if you filled the known universe with monkeys, you’d end up with monkey stars and black holes before any Shakespeare.

          It really only works as a thought experiment about the nature of infinity.

          Unless there’s an infinite multiverse, in which case we are in the universe where a monkey wrote out the complete works of Shakespeare. That monkey’s name? Shakespeare. (And yes, many clapped when he did so.)