News Is there any truth to the monkey theory that writes forever?

[cokebarc]

Hello everyone, I saw a very interesting video and I am confused. Can a monkey really write so accurately if given infinite time? Doesn't this prove the superiority of randomness over creativity?

 

[BvU]

No. Waiting infinitely long is boring.

 

[PeroK]

Hello everyone, I saw a very interesting video and I am confused. Can a monkey really write so accurately if given infinite time? Doesn't this prove the superiority of randomness over creativity?

It's nonsense IMHO. If you write a computer program to generate random letters, then you can estimate how long it would take to randomly generate any piece of text.

A monkey, however, won't keep typing endlessly. A zoo tried this once and after a few minutes, the money got bored and defecated on the typewriter.

 

[Borg]

The tests that have been done so far haven't been promising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem#Actual_monkeys

In 2002, lecturers and students from the University of Plymouth MediaLab Arts course used a £2,000 grant from the Arts Council to study the literary output of real monkeys. They left a computer keyboard in the enclosure of six Celebes crested macaques in Paignton Zoo in Devon, England from May 1 to June 22, with a radio link to broadcast the results on a website.

Not only did the monkeys produce nothing but five total pages largely consisting of the letter "S", the lead male began striking the keyboard with a stone, and other monkeys followed by urinating and defecating on the machine.

 

[Ibix]

Jorge Luis Borges' Library of Babel is worth a read for a more theoretical approach. The problem with randomly generated text is that it's random. The vast, vast, majority of it is garbage (Borges comments that nobody has ever found a comprehensible text in his library). And in among the garbage is a text that says "eating is good", another that says "eating anything is good", and another that says "eating nothing is good", plus many, many similar ones. Which one is correct? How many more nearly correct but dangerously wrong texts are there?

The monkeys is an exercise in combinatorics (taken theoretically) or animal care (taken more literally). It's not anything useful beyond that.

 

[jack action]

Aren't we missing the point by discussing actual monkeys instead of "any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening":

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. [...] The theorem can be generalized to state that any sequence of events that has a non-zero probability of happening will almost certainly occur an infinite number of times, given an infinite amount of time or a universe that is infinite in size.

There are proofs of the theorem that show "probably" does not equal "likely":

Even if every proton in the observable universe (which is estimated at roughly 10⁸⁰) were a monkey with a typewriter, typing from the Big Bang until the end of the universe (when protons might no longer exist), they would still need a far greater amount of time – more than three hundred and sixty thousand orders of magnitude longer – to have even a 1 in 10500 chance of success. To put it another way, for a one in a trillion chance of success, there would need to be 10^360,641 observable universes made of protonic monkeys. [...] "The probability of Hamlet is therefore zero in any operational sense of an event ...", and the statement that the monkeys must eventually succeed "gives a misleading conclusion about very, very large numbers."

In fact, there is less than a one in a trillion chance of success that such a universe made of monkeys could type any particular document a mere 79 characters long.

So to answer your questions:

Can a monkey really write so accurately if given infinite time? Doesn't this prove the superiority of randomness over creativity?

If "one monkey" is literally implied then no, a monkey will never write so accurately.

If we take it metaphorically, we probably need to answer this question first: "Is time infinite?" If not, then creativity must play a role somehow, otherwise a lot of events would most likely be impossible. If so, then our existence may contribute to proving that theorem since the work of Shakespeare already exists.

Your question is more philosophical in nature and would be about determinism vs indeterminism.

 

[Baluncore]

Given ten million years, it is possible that the monkey's descendants may evolve into creative writers.

 

[jedishrfu]

It's time to close this thread, as the simians have decided not to respond.