this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 month ago (2 children)

You don't get to pick and choose! You get infinite monkeys. What's all this about duplicate sets? Sounds like somebody is trying to bring in a ringer! That's cheatin!

[–] Malgas@beehaw.org 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The point is there's no statistical difference between rolling one die an infinite number of times, rolling an infinite number of dice once, and rolling an infinite number of dice an infinite number of times.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 1 points 1 month ago

My comment was made in jest, I don't actually believe this person was trying to "cheat" on the thought experiment by selecting only smart monkeys lol.

[–] Buddahriffic@lemmy.world 1 points 1 month ago

That's the thing about infinity. If you have infinite monkeys, you don't have to choose. You'll have infinite instances of every possibility.

Finding any of the monkeys that typed out something interesting (or did something interesting that wasn't typing or more common interesting monkey stuff) is another issue. If there's an 0.0000001% of something interesting and unusual happening by coincidence, then there will be 999,999,999 uninteresting or usual instances for each interesting and unusual one.

Now if there were infinite copies of you searching the infinite monkeys for interesting and unusual events and all interesting ones get sent to an email address, the email server would overload in about the time it takes for the quickest interesting thing to happen, be noticed, and reported.