Comment on Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy Infintiy
millie@beehaw.org 1 month agoConsidering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren’t Hamlet? I’m honestly not fully convinced that you’d necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.
absentbird@lemm.ee 1 month ago
There aren’t an infinite arrangements of keystrokes that are the length of Hamlet and aren’t Hamlet. Hamlet is 191,726 characters long, it’s like guessing a password.
44 keys on a typewriter, 191726 characters, makes 44^191726 or about 4.054 × 10^315094 combinations.
millie@beehaw.org 1 month ago
You’re shifting the goalposts, and that still doesn’t work.
An infinite number of monkeys typing for an infinite length of time doesn’t necessitate that they stop once they reach 191,726 characters. It also doesn’t necessitate that they never repeat a pattern of characters. In fact, it’s incredibly likely that they repeat the same pattern more often than not. They’re probably going to repeatedly press keys that are in proximity to one another while moving around the keyboard. Things like: “;ml9o fklibhuasdfbuklghaol;jios9 fdlhnikuasdf”.
If you’re measuring whether or not eventually you’ll produce Hamlet by typing out every single possible permutation of 191,726 characters on a keyboard, well… yeah, of course you will. But infinite monkeys aren’t a grid search system for combinations of keystrokes, they’re monkeys mashing the keys without knowing what they mean or in all likelihood what a typewriter is.
You want monkeys on keyboards? You’re mostly going to get gibberish.
absentbird@lemm.ee 1 month ago
I think you’re the one who is moving the goalposts. There’s no requirement for the monkeys to submit their output, the test is whether the text of Hamlet is among their key presses. As long as there is a nonzero chance, then there is a 100% chance it would appear in an infinite system. Any non-zero probability times infinity has a 100% chance of occuring eventually.
The monkeys mostly produce gibberish, that’s the vast majority of the potential outputs, but among that massive number is also the full text of Hamlet.
millie@beehaw.org 1 month ago
I mean it seems like you’re just kind of asserting that it will be there. Just repeating it doesn’t make it more true.