It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare.
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It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. However my thesis is that this formulation is naive, and we can in fact establish a far lower bound. Proof: William Shakespeare, a monkey, produced the works of Shakespeare. Therefore the number of monkeys needed to produce the work of Shakespeare is no greater than the number of primates who lived between Altiatlasius koulchii (57 million years ago) and 1610 CE. Roughly how many monkeys is that?
@mcc Minimum bound though; we could have gotten an outlier result
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It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. However my thesis is that this formulation is naive, and we can in fact establish a far lower bound. Proof: William Shakespeare, a monkey, produced the works of Shakespeare. Therefore the number of monkeys needed to produce the work of Shakespeare is no greater than the number of primates who lived between Altiatlasius koulchii (57 million years ago) and 1610 CE. Roughly how many monkeys is that?
@mcc using overly generous estimates, let's assume a median number of a thousand extant simian species at any given year, a median simian population of 1 million individuals per species per generation, and a median generation time of 10 years. Atliatlassius is a fine enough spot to start the clock, which i'll round to 60 million years in the interest of conservatism and keeping only one sig fig.
so that gives 6 * 106 * 106 * 103 / 101 = 6 * 1014, or a lower bound of 600,000,000,000,000, or a mere 600 quadrillion monkeys, as a conservative lower bound.
edit: fix typo and clarify simians, not all primates, which would probably add another zero.
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@thattommyhall i actually until digging through wikipedia a moment ago assumed apes were a subcategory of monkeys. Apparently the actual monkey/ape supercategory is Simians. I'm not so sure about this. This feels like "bugs" to me.
@mcc @thattommyhall yeah, in my experience biologists don't use a cladistic or monophyletic definition of "monkey". So a typical biologist would say that humans are primates and simians and apes, but are not monkeys.
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It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. However my thesis is that this formulation is naive, and we can in fact establish a far lower bound. Proof: William Shakespeare, a monkey, produced the works of Shakespeare. Therefore the number of monkeys needed to produce the work of Shakespeare is no greater than the number of primates who lived between Altiatlasius koulchii (57 million years ago) and 1610 CE. Roughly how many monkeys is that?
@mcc LEAN in, sister.
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It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. However my thesis is that this formulation is naive, and we can in fact establish a far lower bound. Proof: William Shakespeare, a monkey, produced the works of Shakespeare. Therefore the number of monkeys needed to produce the work of Shakespeare is no greater than the number of primates who lived between Altiatlasius koulchii (57 million years ago) and 1610 CE. Roughly how many monkeys is that?
@mcc interesting theory.
Knowing how fast sapiens monkeys grew in number the last 200years I'd say not more than 20 billions.
Which is far from an infinite number of monkeys, very reassuring -
@mcc One
Let me point you to the multiple horse theory, but I have the conjecture it also applies to monkeys
Maybe there's even only one horse-monkey
This is to be determined
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It's well known that an infinite number of monkeys will eventually produce the works of Shakespeare. However my thesis is that this formulation is naive, and we can in fact establish a far lower bound. Proof: William Shakespeare, a monkey, produced the works of Shakespeare. Therefore the number of monkeys needed to produce the work of Shakespeare is no greater than the number of primates who lived between Altiatlasius koulchii (57 million years ago) and 1610 CE. Roughly how many monkeys is that?
@mcc I’d argue this an equivalent thesis/proof proposal:
“It’s well known that an infinite number of rolls of a D20 will eventually result in a 20 being rolled. […] I just rolled a D20 and got a 20 on my first attempt*. Therefore the number of rolls to produce a 20 is no more than one.”*my old D&D group knows this is a lie but roll** with me here
**lol -
@mcc I’d argue this an equivalent thesis/proof proposal:
“It’s well known that an infinite number of rolls of a D20 will eventually result in a 20 being rolled. […] I just rolled a D20 and got a 20 on my first attempt*. Therefore the number of rolls to produce a 20 is no more than one.”*my old D&D group knows this is a lie but roll** with me here
**lol@mcc Methinks this is actually calculating the number of monkeys(/simians) it took for *this particular* (uh) simulation to produce the works of Shakespeare, not an overall upper bound.
(Apologies if I’m being pedantic and/or a killjoy; hope you feel better soon.)
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@mcc One
Let me point you to the multiple horse theory, but I have the conjecture it also applies to monkeys
Maybe there's even only one horse-monkey
This is to be determined
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@Yuki the existence of one (1) horse-monkey would significantly upset evolutionary theory, i'd say
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@mcc Minimum bound though; we could have gotten an outlier result
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@mcc Methinks this is actually calculating the number of monkeys(/simians) it took for *this particular* (uh) simulation to produce the works of Shakespeare, not an overall upper bound.
(Apologies if I’m being pedantic and/or a killjoy; hope you feel better soon.)
@itohsnap @mcc
Possibly works of Shakespeare follow a Poisson distribution with a very low probability of getting them per monkey-year. All we know at this point is we got one with the amount of monkey-years that have existed so far, but won't be able to estimate how probable it was until it happens again. -
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