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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."
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.'
Sounds like the computers I pulled out of service at a local, "special" public high school-- "special" as in, "if these kids fail out of here they go to jail."
We replaced three classrooms full of practically destroyed PII/300s with brand new Compaqs back around Thanksgiving. I think the best part was when we discovered that all the mouse balls were missing-- they apparently make great projectiles for throwing at your fellow incorrigibles.
Before we were even finished the multi-day project, one of the new machines had had the RAM stolen out of it, and several had had the Windows license code stickers torn off or were otherwise defaced.
Since the school didn't want to pay for optical mice, they decided to get around the mouse ball problem by giving the teachers control of the mice-- they waste time at the beginning and end of each class period distributing and collecting the mice. Honestly though, having been there and seeing how those fucking animals behaved, trying to educate them at all is a major waste of time. They should all just be executed, and my tax money should be put to better use.
I did this little experiment. A hundred million years ago I started with a couple of million monkeys, and I let them go to see what would happen. They got off to a slow start and didn't do much for a long time except have sex and eat and sleep. But then, after waiting long enough, one of these monkey's descendents had a kid named William Shakespeare and he sat down and produced the complete works of William Shakespeare. Thereby proving my theorem, an infinite number of monkeys, given an infinite amount a time, will produce the complete works of William Shakespeare. And I didn't even need an infinite amount of either monkeys or time.
I don't think the "monkeys" saying was a real scientific hypothesis, but rather a literary illustration.
In any truly random numeric sequence with a uniform distribution, it can be mathematically proven (among other things) this implies that any finite length string must eventually appear (so, the works of Shakespeare would eventually pop up). But, it's quite difficult to prove that anything is random by a strict mathematical definition, btw, although there are quite a few randomness conjectures that seem to be true at this point, such as that the digits of pi are "random".
Living things and biological or even mechanical processes in general are notoriously non-random -- even though they may not be completely deterministic (I'll leave that one up to the philosophers and theologians to debate). For instance, if you asked a human to generate a random sequence, he/she would have a bias against generating repeated ("11111111111...") or seemingly orderly sequences ("123456..."), so this bias would cause the human sequence to be inherently non-random.
The best random sequence generators have been natural background noise or radioactive decay, and you can actually get hardware that uses such natural processes to generate what seems to be random... so perhaps the monkeys should be replaced with radioisotopes, and maybe you will get that Shakespeare!
-- Samir Gupta, Ph. D. Head, New Technology Research Group, Nintendo Co. Ltd., Kyoto, Japan.
True, but it still leaves you with the randomness problem. Here's my theory on why this is very unlikely:
Since monkeys aren't random almost certainly nothing that makes sense will be typed. They'll find some way of having fun with say, the carriage return or jamming the typewriter. And since the distribution of QWERTY doesn't really match the usage frequency of the letters the usual "random" typing people do wouldn't make good text. For example, I'll "randomly" type something: lgkljadthglbkads. Now look at it, and you'll see pretty much all of it is in the middle row. If you try better you'll almost certainly be pressing the keys under your hands, in a not completely random order, and moving the hands around the keyboard not very randomly either. Humans don't type randomly, monkeys probably wouldn't either.
four pages worth of the letter 's.'
The problem with truly random data is that you can't really be sure. That four pages of the letter 's' could very well be what starts out the "monkey at a computer" random stream.
NO CARRIER
Initially I thought that it makes sence that given an infiniately large universe, there has to be a planet like Earth, but this is not true. The example given to me was the set of odd numbers. This set is infinite, but no matter how hard you look in that set you'll never find the number 2.
I'm not a math wiz, but I think your two examples mixes apples and oranges.
Think of Set theory. You have a 'universe', and I don't mean the universe in your example, but the 'universe' as in the set of all possible values that can exist. Your number example *by definition* excluded the number '2' from the universe, which was the set of odd numbers. The probability of an event not in the universe occuring is always 0.
On the other hand, Earth is a planet, therefore we know that it is in the universal set of planets.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I am not a number! I am a man! And don't you ... oh wait, I'm #93427. Ha ha! In your face #93428!
93428? Haha, I'm 1227!
On a more serious note, it does interest me that the monkeys had a fixation with urinating on the keyboard. There may be some reason for it, this calls for another study!
http://www.xpurple.com
I found Infinity and the mind by Rudy Rucker an interesting book about the mathematical concept of 'infinity', written for a non-specialized audience.
JP