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
17 events
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| Sep 11, 2016 at 8:33 | comment | added | Did | @Henry What I like most about the BBC piece is the quote on the right column, saying "The work was interesting but had little scientific value, except to show that the "infinite monkey" theory is flawed" by some "Dr" who happens to be "Paignton Zoo scientific officer". "the "infinite monkey" theory is flawed"? Sure, dude, sure... | |
| Sep 26, 2012 at 21:40 | comment | added | debitanostra | Look at the photos in the second half of the book. The monkeys are not actually typing at all. They are just standing on some keys and the keys are then auto-repeating 10 times/sec or whatever. That is why you get pages of nothing but s. So I reject this empirical evidence. It shows monkeys standing - or resting their hands on the keys - not monkeys typing :) | |
| Dec 9, 2011 at 5:35 | comment | added | comonad | @Asaf-Karagila: Yes, indeed. We need some pure mathematical definition of a monkey to argue about, so that we do not enter the category of empirical data. Something that doesn't depend on actual physical monkeys but relate to them. (Probably sth. like banana-brackets from category theory, which relate to bananas only in syntax.) But even using temporal logic, we can't exclude the possibility that the desired event won't happen in finite time. | |
| Dec 2, 2011 at 18:10 | comment | added | Asaf Karagila♦ | The correlation between math and empirical data is at best coincidental. | |
| Dec 2, 2011 at 17:50 | history | edited | comonad | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 2, 2011 at 17:40 | comment | added | comonad | @Henry: Nice! I've known about such an experiment for a long time, but didn't think that it was published in the news. Thx for the reference! | |
| Dec 2, 2011 at 17:40 | comment | added | comonad | @Didier: Thx for the @ thing, I didn't know. | |
| Nov 14, 2011 at 0:34 | comment | added | Henry | @Didier: There is empirical evidence from an experiment reported by the BBC and I suspect that the actual text produced would fail most test of randomness. | |
| Nov 12, 2011 at 20:57 | comment | added | Did | This is what I call a zero-content comment. (But please learn how to use the @ thing, that is, if you want to actually reach the person.) | |
| Nov 12, 2011 at 7:44 | comment | added | comonad | Just look at the monkey, dude! Not better than a baby on the piano, nearly repeating the same wham from before. (Assumed that it's not Markov's child playing.) | |
| Nov 11, 2011 at 20:57 | comment | added | Did | Monkeys don't produce a proper random distribution on keystrokes. Not even a Markov-chain of keystrokes. How do you know? | |
| Jan 27, 2011 at 21:23 | history | edited | comonad | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Jan 27, 2011 at 21:22 | comment | added | comonad | daah... yeah, of course. silly me. – The german word "eventuell" means "possibly" in english. It's one of those strange words... The inventor of the english language must have written some bugs in one of the first english dictionaries, which is now hardwired in the standard library. | |
| Jan 16, 2011 at 10:50 | comment | added | Rasmus | Did you mean "perhaps" instead of "eventually"? | |
| Jan 15, 2011 at 6:13 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Jeff Atwood | ||
| Jan 12, 2011 at 21:43 | history | edited | comonad | CC BY-SA 2.5 |
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| Jan 12, 2011 at 21:35 | history | answered | comonad | CC BY-SA 2.5 |