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Comment by qarl | Hacker News Reader

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qarl·

200,000 is quite a bit smaller than infinite.

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Clearly not infinite monkeys or infinite time.

If either were truly infinite not only would this be possible, it would be mandatory and would occur infinite times.

Sounds to me that the more interesting question would be graphing out the relationship of time and the amount of monkeys needed for one to write Shakespeare.

That's done in the paper. Using a log(log) scale for time, measured in number of heat deaths of the universe. It's the most amusing part of the study.

Awesome! I really should have checked the paper and skipped the article entirely.

The figure in question: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632...

Kind of embarrassing to even be in this thread spending time here but would it not also be probable, however unlikely, to never get the full works of Shakespeare?

With fixed tries/time, or without true randomness, yes.

With infinite tries/time and true randomness, no.

The reporting on this paper is crazy. In the highlights section of the paper’s page on the journal’s website it says “The long-established result of the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is correct, but misleading.” but the Guardian article says “Australian mathematicians call into question the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ in new research on old adage”, which I read as contradictory to what’s in the paper.

It calls into question the applicability of the infinite monkeys theorem, so the headline is correct but misleading :)

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