this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 2 days ago (2 children)

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 days ago

You stupid monkey!

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 days ago

Them saying that is like me saying Bizmuth isn't radioactive because it's half-life is many, many times longer than even the most conservative estimates for the heat-death of the universe.

In finite time that's effectively true, because the universe itself would decay before a block of bizmuth lost any significant weight - but it isn't physically true, because with infinite time a block of bizmuth left completely alone would evaporate away via alpha decay.

And that's the point of infinite time - to let you throw away time and probabilities as obstacles and strictly focus on whether something could physically happen, rather than the odds of it occurring.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

This thread could well have been written by an infinite amount of monkeys, too.

Thoiei0z ao;qjlk a 2897n3 eiie??! hoenwk a ;jihiwe a wiiien theohg rosebud oiwoi;qne i93823hnn banana

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Hell, an actually infinite amount of monkeys would produce the complete works of Shakespeare plus some originals in the same style in the exact amount of time it took to literally press the necessary buttons.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days 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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Next question, would Shakespeare appear in the Library of Babel?

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 days ago

infinite - infinite = infinite, take that infinite

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 days ago

I once heard that monkeys will just go to the typewriter, tipe the same letter a few times and leave. Doesn't sound like Shakespeare to me

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