• chumbalumber@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    1 year ago

    While sure it’s a funny joke, it also kind of misses the point of the original analogy. The monkeys are intended to be stand ins for entirely random inputs, which Shakespeare, and the human species as a whole, is not.

    • delitomatoes@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      But to get Shakespeare it was random, all the wars and plagues and volcanic eruptions and his ancestors moving around the country and him being born in a time where writing plays was a viable career

      • applebusch@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Yeah but the odds are only meaningful if someone was expecting Hamlett specifically to get written in the first place. Without that it ceases to be a significant event, and reduces to merely the event that happened. Just because one arrangement of molecules is unique doesn’t mean it’s special if any number of other arrangements is functionally the same. The same argument applies to any person. Yeah the odds of you in particular being born are astronomical, but that doesn’t make you special, because if it wasn’t you it would have been someone substantially similar to you. After all, your parents were making a baby either way.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Those won’t random acts though. They were decisions and actions from outside inputs. If you had enough data you could recreate the events from the big bang onwards in theory. Assuming human decision making is deterministic.

        Random in this case means random as in if a particle decays or not. Not simply harder to predict as in human behaviour.

  • alvvayson@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Ok, mind is blown.

    And also… I kind of think this double entendre was intended from the beginning.

  • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As the owner of both an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters, I can tell you from experience that I have not gotten one single work of Shakespeare, but I have had to clean a lot of monkey poo off the walls.

  • _TheThunderWolf_@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Well someone did write Hamlet but we don’t actually know who. So the thought experiment holds up even better because it is a random person we don’t know much about.

    • Jazard23@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 year ago

      We do know who wrote it, some people are just too elitist to accept it was a middle class boy from Stratford-upon-Avon