this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
458 points (94.2% liked)
Technology
72315 readers
2687 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
the actual analog isn't a million monkeys. you only need one monkey. but it's for an infinite amount of time. the probability isn't practically zero, it's one. that's how infinity works. not only will it happen, but it will happen again, infinitely many times.
That's not true. Something can be infinite and still not contain every possibility. This is a common misconceptoin.
For instance, consider an infinite series of numbers created by adding an additional "1" to the end of the previous number.
So we can start with 1. The next term is 11, followed by 111, then 1111, etc. The series is infinite since we can keep the pattern going forever.
However at no point will you ever see a "2" in the sequence. The infinite series does not contain every possible digit.
Anything with a nonzero probability will happen infinitely many times. The complete works of Shakespeare consist of 5,132,954 characters, 78 distinct ones. 1/(78^5132954 ) is an incomprehensibly tiny number, millions of zeroes after the decimal, but it is not zero. So the probability of it happening after infinitely many trials is 1. lim(1-(1-P)^n ) as n approaches infinity is 1 for any nonzero P.
An outcome that you'd never see would be a character that isn't on the keyboard.