Six Monkeys And An Old Saw

Sayten241 writes "They say that an infinite amount of monkeys typing at an infinite amount of typewriters will produce literature greater than Shakespeare. Well, it has been proven that six monkeys and one computer will produce a computer that has been smashed with a rock, urinated upon, and four pages worth of the letter 's.' The end of the article states that scientifically this does prove that monkeys are more complex than random generators."

Comments

Original BBC story, more links

[WIAKywbfatw]

This was research carried out by the University of Plymouth (that's Plymouth in the UK, not in the US) at the nearby Paignton Zoo.

And here's the original BBC News story.

I'm not sure I see any real value in their research, but I am concerned about their methodology - that's an awfully small data set (only six monkeys, and only over one month) from which to draw any concrete conclusions...

Original idea

[sunaj]

If I'm not mistaken the original idea was:

An infinate number of monkeys typing on an infinite number of keyboards for an infinite amount of time will produce the complete works of Shakespeare in the correct order! It is used to help people to gain some concept of infinity. In a universe that is infinite in space and time, anything can and will happen. An amazing concept when you think about it!

Re:Original idea

[Violet Null]

Hrmmmm...no, technically, if something has a non-zero probability of ocurring, and there are an infinite number of chances for it to occur, it will eventually occur (and will, in fact, occur an infinite number of times, seeing as how x% * infinity is still an infinite number).

If your chance of getting an orange is 0, you will get an infinite number of apples and 0 oranges. But if it's anything greater than 0 -- anything at all -- you will end up with an infinite number of apples and an infinite number of oranges. By definition.

Re:Original idea

[arkhan_jg]

You're equally wrong about infinity. If there is a non-zero possibility of something happening within a bounded set, which is governed by infinite time or space, it WILL happen. It MUST happen, by the rules of infinity. In fact, it will happen an infinite number of times. infinity * 0.01 = infinity, infinity + 1 = infinity, even infinity - infinity = infinity.

The ONLY way for something not to happen in an infinite space, is for it to have a 0% probability. The example you give (again) is flawed; an infinite set of odd numbers has the implicit boundary condition that no even number be contained in the dataset. Therefore, there is 0% of one occuring, therefore it will not occur. The ONLY case in which it cannot occur. This is how infinity is defined to work.

Most people tend to handle infinity by thinking of it as a 'really big number'. It isn't. It's a mathematical concept, a tool. In many ways, it's more like the decimal place - something you use to get useful work done, but by itself, fairly useless.

Now, the problems come when people try to apply a mathematical theory to the real world/universe.

For starters, there are implicit boundaries. The physics of our current spot of the universe are taken to apply to all of it.

Time may be infinite in our universe, and possibly space (assuming an ever expanding universe) but energy isn't (finite number of stars, as far as we know). As the universe tends to infinity, that energy gets more and more thinly spread, until, using our own physics, any given spot has an infinitely small amount of energy, i.e. tends to 0. Practically, of course, most of it would be tied up in black holes, where we currently couldn't get at it. Either way, there's only a relatively small chunk of time where we can survive using our current energy techniques, i.e. get it all from that bloody big fusion reactor just over there.

There are other boundaries for example. If we take the predicted lifespan of our species, multiplied by the space which we could reach in that timespan, you only have a limited amount of space, even assuming a large lifespan (without extinction events) of say, 2 million years. We also assume that we don't manage to go faster than light.

Depending on what handwaving you do to generate the probabilities of planets per star, and chance of lifer per planet, the chances of finding alien life that exists in the same time/space chunk of the universe that we do, and is capable of communication with us are still pretty small.

So even in an infinite universe, we need to apply the boundary conditions that are relevent to us. And those boundary conditions are largely handwavy conjecture as to where they actually fall, but they still exist, and are pretty tight.

So basically, infinity cannot be used to prove the existence of alien life, at least not in the subset of the universe that we inhabit. But thats not for the reason that infinity is wrong, but that people use it without including their implicit boundary conditions, or that they don't understand how infinity works (which frankly is most people, and I personally have to keep banging myself on the head to get it right)

Maths lecture over...

Re:Federal government arts grant

[jamie]

"Remember the "artist" Serrano, who got paid $16,000 by Washington to drop a photo in a mayonnaise jar of his own urine"

The National Endowment for the Arts gave $75,000 (matched two-to-one with private money) to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Act. The Center selected a panel. The panel selected Andre Serrano. The Center gave Serrano $15,000 of Endowment money based on the quality of his work.

- "Fact Sheet on American Family Association Fundraising Advertisement," National Endowment for the Arts, February 1990 (as cited in Culture Wars, 1992, p. 152.

Serrano did Piss Christ in 1987. It is a photograph of a crucifix immersed in an amber liquid. In 1988 he won the fellowship from Awards in the Visual Arts, a program administered by SECCA. In that same year, Piss Christ was one of the works included in an SECCA traveling exhibition by AVA award winners.

So: $5,000 of Washington's money was matched with $10,000 in private donations and given to SECCA. That money, along with other sources of funding for SECCA, funds the AVA program. Serrano was given an award for his work which obviously included works besides just Piss Christ.

Just FYI :)

The complete text

[Anonymous Coward]

is available here (warning: 2.82 MB pdf)