Then could one go over to a shelf and take down this one big volume the monkeys had produced, open it, and read all of the plays, etc.? I don't think so. If just such a volume isn't produced, the works of Shakespeare will not have been duplicated. Or is the claim that over the course of trillions of years, all of the works will be typed out at some point, exactly as Shakespeare wrote them, although there may be sextillions of nonsense keystrokes between the appearance of Sonnet 26 and "Love's Labour's Lost"? I doubt we'd even get "Do Wa Diddy" from the immortal Manfred Mann, using such a process. Other letters and words from everything else ever put in writing by humankind (likely extinct by this point) would keep getting in the way, so that no single literary (or otherwise) work could appear on "the page."

It's hard to wrap one's mind around infinity. It doesn't seem very likely to me either. Whoever first came up with this thought experiment, or whoever was so audacious to want to include all of the works of Shakespeare, was probably being a little overzealous in his desire to prove a point.

Dawkins, in The Blind Watchman, simplifies the thought experiment to the phrase, METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL, and gives the monkey a simpler typewriter that only has 26 keys, all caps. How long would it take the monkey to write this one little sentence? Dawkins wrote a computer program to do the work of the monkey, and it takes about a half an hour. But add another sentence to the equation, and I would guess it would take considerably longer. An entire work of Shakespeare would seem highly improbable even under these simplified conditions, but Dawkins' point is only that "the preservation of small changes in an evolving string of characters (or genes) can produce meaningful combinations in a relatively short time as long as there is some mechanism to select cumulative changes."

(Emphasis mine.) Aha! And there's the rub! It needs a mechanism to select cumulative changes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasel_program

The problem with the weasel program, as Dawkins acknowledges, is that it sets out with a pre-determined goal. Evolution has no goal in "mind." Each step of the selection process must contribute to the organism's survival or, at least, not be too deleterious. The baby steps on the way to evolving a wing, for example, (and flight was never the goal because there was no ultimate goal) must make sense from an evolutionary standpoint. As Dennet discusses in Darwin's Dangerous Idea, many adaptations in biology are exapted (Gould's term) for other purposes, just as a spandrel in architecture has been exapted for other purposes. There are many examples of this in the fossil record and with extant species as well. What good is a half a wing? you may ask.

https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/art ... cology-and

I'm totally hung up on the literal ramifications of this thought experiment. But it seems to me that any experiment is an exercise in literalism. I'm assuming that Dawkins replaces the monkey with a computer program for the sake of efficiency and speed, but does he preserve total randomness? Does the computer program, unlike the monkey, know English syntax, e.g.?

In terms of the thought experiment, presumably the selection would be done by a human looking over the monkey's shoulder. The human would be needed to recognize that in the randomness of these miles of print-outs, Shakespeare's works are embedded. Of course, every other work known to exist, as well as a few centuries of newspaper stories, etc., would be there, too (again, presumably), and in every language. There was no goal in the monkey/computer mind to get to Shakespeare's works in the first place. So selection would actually seem to be impossible.

stahrwe wrote: Perhaps this is was a thought experiment but it is essentially flawed. Will the monkeys be provided with new typyewriters/computers? Can they call for a repair under a full service maintenance agreement with an infinite period of performance? If so, who pays for the repairs? Who provides the paper and ribbon or printer ink? Who monitors production to verify that the plays are complete and accurate? The so called thought experiment is a fraudulent attempt to subvert Christian faith by substituting time for God. The perennial canard leveled at religions, "God did it," is hereby replaced by, "Time did it." Given the subjective nature of the discussion, neither claim is valid.

?????

Judging by this post, it looks a lot like your opening post was actually unrelated to the monkeys+typewriter=Shakespeare thought experiment. You were actually talking about Christianity, somehow.

And: the monkeys+typewriter=Shakespeare thought experiment is just that -- a thought experiment. If you want, we can just invent some magical typewriters that never need repairs and monkeys that would prefer to poke their fingers on the keys rather than break them or poo on them. It's a thought experiment. It takes place in a make-believe universe that mirrors our own in very minor ways that we care about. I don't understand why it's necessary for me to explain this.

Many in this thread have forgotten that Stahrwe proved infinity = -1/12. A -1/12 number of monkeys couldn't even snap one keystroke in -1/12 period of time, therefore the whole experiment is ridiculous.

DWill wrote:Perhaps I just have a hard time getting my head around this, believing that no matter how much time is available, the complete works of Shakespeare would be duplicated in both content and form, with all the parts apportioned to the correct speakers, the poems set off line by line, stage directions given, etc. No, I have to stay with my feeling that even infinity can't deliver that product in a random process.

I wonder whether even a single sonnet would result.

I don't think there truly is a way to get your head around it. You have to approach it differently than trying to wrap your head around it. Basically, if an event is possible within the limitations of physics - any mention of probability aside - then it would happen an infinite number of times given an infinite time period. Probability doesn't apply within the concept of infinity. The smallest possible probability you could possibly imagine would be inevitable. That's the nature of infinity. If your mind rejects that, then you're reacting normally to the concept of infinity. It's a nonsensical concept.

Interbane wrote: It's a nonsensical concept.

"Infinity" is a conceptual tool for thinking about the abstract. I don't think there's anything in the real world represented by infinity, unlike, say, "12" which we can see represented by a carton of eggs. That means the monkeys-on-typewriters thought experiment must be seen as an abstract idea only. Given enough time, really improbable things can happen. That's as far as it goes.

LanDroid wrote:Many in this thread have forgotten that Stahrwe proved infinity = -1/12. A -1/12 number of monkeys couldn't even snap one keystroke in -1/12 period of time, therefore the whole experiment is ridiculous.

Is there a thread regarding that -1/12 thing? I can see something that looks mathy in stahrwe's signature, but that signature tells me nothing.

Yes there was a thread on Stahrwe's signature equation probably a year ago. If you go on youtube there are videos with the "proof", IIRC they use quite a bit of subtraction in the calculations.

Is this it?



EDIT: I just watched the video. I find it very unconvincing, but I'll just take their word for it.