this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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It only took a couple billion monkeys a few million years but one did eventually write out the full works of Shakespeare
This is always how I've chosen to interpret the expression. It's not a theory. It's an observation.
It's a thought experiment, not an observation. The idea is that if you have infinity and it's truly random than eventually all possibilities emerge somewhere within that.
The idea of infinite monkeys typing randomly on infinite typewriters is that eventually one of them would accidentally type out all the works of Shakespeare. Many more would type out parts of the works of Shakespeare. And many many many more would type random garbage.
If we then take that forwadd imagine for a moment the multiverse is also infinite and random, then every possible universe would exist somewhere in that multiverse.
It can be taken in other directions too. It's a way of cocneptualising the implications of infinity and true randomness.
Meanwhile actual Shakespeare had intelligence and wrote and created his works. Him being a monkey writing Shakespeare is just a sly humerous observation, but it has nothing to do with the actual meaning of the thought experiment and the idea it is trying to convey.
Yeah, the point isn't that they could write Shakespeare. But that they would write everything we could imagine + everything in between that.
It tries to explain the concept of infinity. Which is mind boggling to any human.
Also since it should happen once, that means that it also happens an infinite number of times, but a smaller infinity than the whole infinity.
Did you choose to overlook my intentional usage of the word "chosen" just to mansplain something obvious? I did not make my choice out of ignorance, but I appreciate you assuming I did.
Alas, not on a typewriter... Back to the drawing board!
No, the FIRST monkey to write Shakespeare used a feather and ink.
It only took a couple hundred years after all those millions for them to be written on the typewriter.
Turns out not quite. In the monkey version Hamlet says, "To be, or what."
A property of hydrogen is that, given enough hydrogen and time, eventually it will write out the full works of Shakespeare.