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Very good resource. However, I fail to understand how a monkey writing the Hamlet is akin to a brute-force problem, in Terence's own words. The thesis seems to
by binyu 16d ago
Very good resource. However, I fail to understand how a monkey writing the Hamlet is akin to a brute-force problem, in Terence's own words. The thesis seems to be here that given enough time, a monkey will be able to reason as a human.
Edit: Probably refers to the evolutionary aspect of the problem. My criticism is that he compares the time for a monkey needed to learn the hamlet to merely "quadratic time". I disagree that such degree of non-linearity applies here. I think it is grossly simplified/underestimated.
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- hmokiguess 16d agoCould you be conflating writing hamlet with understanding how to write hamlet? as in, what it takes to end up with the same raw output though devoid of intent and meaning
- orphereus 16d agoTo be fair, I didn't watch the video to the part where he mentions monkeys writing Hamlet, but I thought the point of the monkeys is that they will stumble upon a Hamlet by accident at some point in time, by randomly pressing buttons on a keyboard. Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point.
- andsoitis 16d ago> Obviously, it would take a long time, but it would happen at some point. Has someone done the calculation whether it would happen before the end of the universe?
- eyeundersand 15d agoIt would involve multiple, multiple universes (but not infinite) coming and going. Even with infinite monkeys.
- seanhunter 16d agoHe doesn’t say quadratic time, he says infinite time. He is talking about the probability of any given string arising from a random sequence of letters. As t goes to infinity that probability approaches 1. The monkeys don’t understand hamlet. They just bash enough keys that it appears by chance (eventually). Hence “‘It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…’ Stupid monkey. “
- johnp314 16d agoHere's something to ponder. Assuming the Riemann Hypothesis is true, would that monkey type out a proof of the RH before it got to Hamlet? I guess it depends on if the proof can be expressed in fewer words than the word count of Hamlet.
- leonidasrup 15d ago"The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys independently and at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type any given text, including the complete works of William Shakespeare." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infinite_monkey_theorem