this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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And an infinite amount of time.
This "rebuttal" is forced contrarianism. It's embarrassing.
A thought experiment has rules, you can't just change them and say the experiment doesn't make sense...
For what it's worth, it seems like it's this "journalist" trying to make a sensational headline
The researchers themselves very clearly just tried to see if it could happen in our reality
"We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe,"
Hypothesis: every science journalist should be placed in front of a bitch-slapping machine for the rest of their career. Every time they think about writing an article, they get bitch slapped. This will greatly improve the quality of science journalism.
The other part of it is there's not only one monkey who does Hamlet correct on the first attempt, there's two, three four, guess what - an infinite amount of them.
And another infinity that get it right after 5 minutes
Another infinity that take exactly 10 years 3 months 2 days 3 hours 4 minutes and 17 seconds
And another infinity that takes one second less than the life of the universe
And another infinity that takes a googleplex of the lifetime of the universe to complete
that's the point of the thought experiment
How would monkeys type through infinite. Don't they stop, are they not mortals like normal monkeys?