this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2024
128 points (76.9% liked)
Not The Onion
12344 readers
756 users here now
Welcome
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
The Rules
Posts must be:
- Links to news stories from...
- ...credible sources, with...
- ...their original headlines, that...
- ...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”
Comments must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
An infinite number of monkeys typing randomly on an infinite number of typewriters, so long as the writing is truly random, will eventually write every novel. Once you factor in the infinite number of monkeys, every novel in existence will not only be written, it will be written an infinite number of times.
It's like saying if you had a random number generator and gave it an infinite amount of time generating 16 numbers at a time, it would eventually generate every bank card number ever an infinite number of times. Give that task to an infinite number of random number generators and they will generate every bank card number an infinite number of times instantaneously.
Come to think of it, if the tornado throws around junk completely randomly, and provided there's enough material in every junkyard to assemble a plane, the tornado will eventually assemble it. That's the power of infinity and randomness.
You don't need an infinite number of monkeys to ensure that. The cardinality of an infinite collection of 2-tuples (monkey, char) is the same as the cardinality of an infinite sequence of characters, just as the cardinality of the rational numbers is the same as the cardinality of the integers.
And in a countably infinite sequence of uniformly random characters, there is no assurance that any particular finite sequence will occur only a finite number of times.
🤓