this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
1158 points (98.7% liked)

Science Memes

11441 readers
1578 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).

If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.

Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

I mean, even if the typewriter had an extra button setting off a bomb, killing the monkey and all the monkeys around them, they'd still pull it off. That's infinity baby.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges (1941)

A good read.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 month ago

That is wrong assumption. We know that even when something is infinite it may never reach required value. Shakespeare or anything else may be a unique event in the infinite space-time universe.