Timeline for Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, would one of them write Hamlet?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
28 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Feb 4, 2016 at 0:55 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | @J.G: No, I am not a moderator. | |
| May 2, 2015 at 14:28 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | @jeremyradcliff: there are various ways "most" can be applied to infinite sets. If the naturals are divided into a finite set and an infinite set, "most" or "almost all" numbers are in the infinite set. You need some concept of measure to do so. Similarly, most reals are irrational. | |
| May 2, 2015 at 13:36 | comment | added | jeremy radcliff | I think that semantically, the word "most" only applies to finite quantities and therefore doesn't make sense in the context of infinite numbers. | |
| Feb 8, 2015 at 20:27 | comment | added | Ryan Dougherty | Apparently there are 175090 characters in Hamlet (if you use the version here: shakespeare.mit.edu/hamlet/full.html) - so it is slightly more likely ;) | |
| Mar 12, 2014 at 0:42 | comment | added | Muhd | @Incognito That's not correct. If you have an infinite sequence of random characters, the probability of it not containing the works of Shakespeare is 0 (or said differently, as the size of the stream of characters grows toward positive infinity, it approaches 0). Unless you are arguing that monkeys are not perfectly random and thus might fall into some sort of repeating pattern. | |
| Nov 11, 2011 at 6:30 | history | edited | Quixotic | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
added 26 characters in body
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| Jan 15, 2011 at 6:13 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Jeff Atwood | ||
| Jan 14, 2011 at 6:02 | comment | added | Mateen Ulhaq | @David I got some of those for my birthday! | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 4:45 | comment | added | Michael Kopinsky | You guys have blown this WAY out of proportion. If you don't include whitespace, the numbers are much smaller. Number of characters: 194311 Number of non-whitespace characters: 135036 Number of unique characters: 64 Number of unique non-whitespace characters: 51 Number of permutations: 4.33e350960 Number of permutations ignoring whitespace: 2.79e230583 | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 1:26 | comment | added | Jason | @user4014 - I suppose that's a good point. I'm reminded of this dilbert comic: dilbert.com/strips/comic/2001-10-25 | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 20:16 | comment | added | Incognito | I hate to have to be the one to say this, but infinity is not a list of all numbers one could dream up. There is an equally likely chance that an infinite number of monkeys on typewriters will produce all the works of the universe with the exception of any Shakespeare what so ever, just as there is they may produce a limitless supply of nonsense. Infinity is not a list of numbers, for example, infinity may hold multiple infinities. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 18:09 | comment | added | Richard | There has already been consideration of some ability to manage the monkeys: you need the Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite--RFC2795. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 16:57 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | @Cristian: this is the chance that a monkey writes a given string of 193446 characters, assuming all strings are equally likely. The problem domain is not infinite as there are only 60^193446 strings of that length. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 16:47 | comment | added | Cristian Vrabie | Hmm.. I suck at math but what I think you did here is to determine the chance for a monkey that writes "a random string of 193446". The question does not specify that. Isn't the problem domain infinite? | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 13:50 | comment | added | David Murdoch | @Haacked When imaginary numbers were explained to me I was told that the idea of an imaginary number is a lot like a negative number; they don't really exist but to solve a problem. You can't have negative apples. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 13:41 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | @darocig: It depends upon what set you are working in. For $\mathbb{N}$ there are only finitely many smaller, and infinitely many larger. For $\mathbb{R}$, however,... | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 12:19 | comment | added | daroczig | @Ross Millikan: "this is a very large number, but most numbers are larger" -> why would I accept this statement insted of "most numbers are smaller"? | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 11:57 | comment | added | Zhen Lin | @Louis Rhys: Graham's number is a famous example of a meaningful large number. It's an upper bound to an open problem in Ramsey theory. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 10:19 | comment | added | Louis Rhys | So no practical/meaningful number is larger than that? | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 8:34 | comment | added | Haacked | "but most numbers are larger". Not really. There's this infinite set of negative numbers to contend with. :) | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 7:59 | comment | added | Zhen Lin | @Louis Rhys: It is thought that the number of particles in the universe is less than $10^{100}$. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 7:28 | comment | added | Louis Rhys | "this is a very large number, but most numbers are larger" Is there any practical number larger than this? Number of atoms in the universe perhaps? | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 5:28 | comment | added | Erik | all non-infinite numbers are small | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 3:38 | comment | added | Orbling | @Fredrik Meyer: ...and there was I thinking the decline of English was down to textspeak and all forms of youthful disregard for conventions; when actually the inaccurate spelling movement is being led by a band of thespian-tendencied research monkeys. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 2:50 | comment | added | Fredrik Meyer | But what is even more alarming, is that the same monkeys - and probably (in the mathematical sense of the word) within the same time limit mentioned above by Ross Millikan - will write Hamlet with every possible typo imaginable. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 2:24 | comment | added | Ross Millikan | @Sean: not original with me. I saw it in Martin Gardner's column many years ago. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 1:54 | comment | added | jericson | In fact one monkey alone would write Hamlet an infinite number of times given unlimited time. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 1:38 | history | answered | Ross Millikan | CC BY-SA 2.5 |