Timeline for Given an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite amount of time, would one of them write Hamlet?
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| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:21 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Jan 17, 2011 at 6:30 | comment | added | Ibby | @ShreevatsaR: Given the context, you could fairly say that I answered "the wrong question." I would even agree. | |
| Jan 15, 2011 at 18:31 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | As far as I can see, the question is not about whether we can sift through the generated text to find intelligent text ("opening a publishing business. Make a million bucks…"), but whether a specific long text (Hamlet) may be generated by a random process at all. (That is, it's not the question here, though it may have been Hofstadter's, knowing his concerns.) So that part is simply irrelevant. And if you're looking for Hamlet specifically (letter-for-letter), it's a rather simple task that can be done with almost the same amount of resources as stepping through the generated text. | |
| Jan 15, 2011 at 6:13 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Jeff Atwood | ||
| Jan 13, 2011 at 21:00 | comment | added | Ibby | @ShreevatsaR Yes, if it were generated, we'd have trouble finding it, but that's a far out concern. On second thought, though, I think this is where our opinions diverge. In my opinion, this is a more fundamental point than physical limitations, or even the theoretical implication of infinity. You could say I played a sly trick in redefining "generating Hamlet," but I was really trying to make a point about the nature of information. To sum it up differently, I would say, "The question is irrelevant, because data is not information without context." Or, in Hofstadter's words, "Mu." | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 20:53 | comment | added | Ibby | @ShreevatsaR A very large number" is not "practically infinite". I think the stress should be the word "practical" rather than "infinite." If the value could be either its current value or infinity without changing the bottleneck task (qualitatively or quantitatively), how is that anything other than practically infinite? It would be been better if I'd clarified that point more explicitly and earlier in the paragraph, though. | |
| Jan 13, 2011 at 8:03 | comment | added | ShreevatsaR | "modern computing power […] is practically infinite" — I think you misunderstand what "infinite" means. "A very large number" is not "practically infinite". In fact, the world's total computing power isn't even, "relative to the difficulty of the task", close to 10^344000, which is roughly how big you need things to be for Hamlet to be produced. It's a minuscule insignificant fraction of that, which means that we have no chance of generating Hamlet today by an actual uniform random process. Yes, if it were generated, we'd have trouble finding it, but that's a far out concern. | |
| Jan 12, 2011 at 22:47 | history | answered | Ibby | CC BY-SA 2.5 |