this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
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It's a great article IMO, worth the read.
But :
This is such a stupid analogy, the chances for said monkeys to just match a single page any full page accidentally is so slim, it's practically zero.
To just type a simple word like "stupid" which is a 6 letter word, and there are 25⁶ combinations of letters to write it, which is 244140625 combinations for that single simple word!
A page has about 2000 letters = 7,58607870346737857223e+2795 combinations. And that's disregarding punctuation and capital letters and special charecters and numbers.
A million monkeys times a million years times 365 days times 24 hours times 60 minutes times 60 seconds times 10 random typos per second is only 315360000000000000000 or 3.15e+20 combinations assuming none are repaeated. That's only 21 digits, making it 2775 digits short of creating a single page even once.
I'm so sick of seeing this analogy, because it is missing the point by an insane margin. It is extremely misleading, and completely misrepresenting getting something very complex right by chance.
To generate a work of Shakespeare by chance is impossible in the lifespan of this universe. The mathematical likelihood is so staggeringly low that it's considered impossible by AFAIK any scientific and mathematical standard.
You are missing a piece of the analogy.
After each key press the size of the letters change, so some become more likely to be hit than others.
How the size of the keys vary is the secret being sought, and this training requires many, many more monkeys than just producing Shakespeare.
AI data analyst here. The above is an excellent extension of the analogy.
Now, imagine another monkey controlling how the size of the keys vary. There might even be another monkey controlling that one.
The analogy doesn't seem to break until we start talking about the assumptions humans make for efficiency.