So what your saying is, everyone here was more or less in agreement the entire time? Awesome!

wat

I am still here asserting sanity over all of you wikiwarrior madmen. Monkeys don't make hamlet... there is a shocker right?

They should make a tv series about people who necro on the forums. They could call it
*puts on sunglasses
The walking thread

I think people are forgetting that after a few million years of pounding away on typewriters, the monkeys would evolve into something with enough mental capacity to understand how typewriters work, develop archaeology, discover Shakespeare works (or Eve Online) and then some (nerd) grad student post-evolved-monkey would translate the ancient English text (code) into whatever languages that the post-evolved monkeys would speak or run Eve Online in an emulator on the Banana-tosh.

edit: Also, there's nothing holy about thread necromancy.

Too bad you switched the discussion from "monkeys on a typewriter" to "computer throwing out randoms 0s and 1s" in your very own OP, and then only went further and further away from actual monkeys...

Also, holy necro, Batman !



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Nice one.

"But after a month, the Sulawesi crested macaques had only succeeded in partially destroying the machine, using it as a lavatory, and mostly typing the letter "s""

So six monkeys with a computer suddenly dropped into their enclosure and no coaching at all is a definitive study? That was an "art" project, nothing more.

Infinite monkeys each on their own typewriter probably would not produce Shakespeare because of the way they use their hands and their tendency to repeat the same action over and over. However if you were to isolate the monkeys (because they tend to copy one another) and feed all the keystrokes sequentially into a single text, you might get far more interesting results. Of course, you'd need a monkey-proof keyboard.

The "art project" demonstrates a flaw in the very idea of infinite monkeys creating Hamlet. Whatever genius came up with that idea failed to realize that a monkey chained to a keyboard might just type the same key, or that it might take multiple craps in the typewriter in question. How long can a typewriter type with so much monkey poop eroding it's keys?

The "art project" demonstrates a flaw in the very idea of infinite monkeys creating Hamlet. Whatever genius came up with that idea failed to realize that a monkey chained to a keyboard might just type the same key, or that it might take multiple craps in the typewriter in question. How long can a typewriter type with so much monkey poop eroding it's keys?

you are just angry that an actual experiment came along and proved how stupid the idea of infinite monkeys writing hamlet truly is. To bad indeed
When I saw this little gem of a experiment, I was happy that this thread was still bounceable!

Puts her faith in something that can never be observed in tangible reality

I like monkeys.

Sounds a little too much like blind religious faith miss Akita... so sad.

Oh, yeah, because it somehow takes blind almost religious faith to believe that 1+1=2, 2+1=3, 3+1=4, 4+1=5 and so on and so forth for as long as you can care to go... /sarcasm

1. A simple test involving monkeys yields no such results

I just realized another problem with that test: The monkeys weren't immortal. Immortal monkeys might be better typists.

edit: also, those weren't even monkeys.

if the theory states that it may take an infinite amount of time

What an excellent and blatant dodge of post 143 and 144. Here you get a cookie.

You will never randomly generate 10 billion billion billion trillion trillion heads in a row, because if you did the output would no longer be random.

The odds of generating anything meaningful are truly staggering. Let's say you want to randomly produce a particular 140-character code to post to Twitter (yes these really exist). That's 1,120 random bits in a specific order. That means you have 2^1,120 possible outcomes, only one of which is your desired result. To put the spectrum of possibilities in better perspective, that's a 338-digit number that is well on its way to equaling the estimated number of atoms in the known universe.

If you did 10,000 random bits per second for 14 billion years, you'd have generated 3,942,000,000,000,000,000 possible combinations...assuming your randomizer never repeated a set. That's less than 2^64. It will take you another 25-30 billion years to reach 2^65.

Infinite? Yeah, you're going to need infinity to get the results you're looking for.

I retort your assertions be submitting that you do not understand the true nature of randomness.

You are taking it on faith--something that can never be observed. The math is not telling you that it will occur, it is only telling you that it could. Get it?

The outcome is not 100% definite by your own admission