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[pisskop]

Interestingly enough, I just started a somewhat experimental soup, using leftover beef broth that cooked potatoes as a base and adding some blended spinach.

Im using chicken cubes, broccoli, pepper, chives, and balsamic.  Amoung other things.  Usually I make it very simple, but this really is more of an amalgamation of whatever was leftover rather than a plan.  I even have some rainbow corn in a can to add later

[King Zultan]

Looks like the 500 error things aren't as bad to day, I've only gotten one so far.

[hector13]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

[Starver]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

Well, it'll not exactly be "dig a tunnel in Switzerland" amounts of funding. Two theoretical mathematicians spending time on this instead of <insert random hypothetical problem here> isn't really an expense. If that was a criteria of worth, we'd never bother with anything but perhaps something like prime factorisation (though even that might have antivalue, as it potentially rips up cryptographic safeguards that currently let the world run relatively smoothly).

In the "bananas" example, I wonder if they modeled accurately the very real statistic possibility that a short section of alternating tapping might be more likely than seven completely different keys in a row (though "bananam" might be more likely, and something actually 'in a row', like "asdfghj", might be another statistical outlier happen for another reason).

I actually ran some similar (small scale) simulations on almost this same thing myself, years ago, for personal fun, so know from practical experience (as well as trivial mathematical prediction) that there's an (almost) exponential growth of time needed to add subsequent 'correct' characters, but that there are ill-defined but very likely "shortcuts" too. If you've happened to type "to be", then it's not unlikely that you will type that again after a quick diversionary "or not", and it's not such a random walk that makes it unlikely to ever type "Hamlet" or "Falstaff" as much as necessary to mark up the typescript (with or without proper spacing or indentation - I presume they weren't looking for anything more than whitespace-agnostic streams of characters, maybe even ignored spaces/punctuation/line-numbers rather than aiming for anything like precise modern/First Folio exactitude of typesetting) with sufficiently correct consistency to the original markup. Doubtless the paper itself goes into this, if at all considered.

Also, are we bothered in which order the individual works are generated? It reduces the effort needed considerably if we can happily have them out of chronological/folio/thematic order, rather than require a solid string of first-to-last with no diversions or easily rejectable garbage (or word-perfect scripts of The Matrix) in-between. Hopefully they spent their time wisely in assessing the relative necessities of such constraints or flexabilities.

I agree with you about infinity, but then I also facepalm a bit about the article's need to explain here that heat-death is the (in my words, how I might feel it better put) "death of all heat", and I'm not sure who to blame about that.

I also foresee a non-zero chance of an Ig-Nobel Prize.

[Egan_BW]

For the sake of the original hypothetical, the monkeys are being treated as pure random number generators, even though in reality they would be far from truly random, because if you do have infinite time it doesn't really matter so long as there's some finite chance that they might hit the right sequence of keys.

Really, if the number of monkeys is infinite, then you wouldn't even need infinite time, you'd only need enough time for a perfect TAS monkey to bang out the whole thing with perfect accuracy. And the ability to figure out which of your infinite monkeys did it correctly.

[pisskop]

so 2 hungover grad students with a minor in philosophy walk into a low bar ...

[Starver]

so 2 hungover grad students with a minor in philosophy walk into a low bar ...

...ouch! It was the Platonic ideal of an iron bar.

[MonkeyHead]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

Love that they used my profile pic in that story.

Also, I debate the assertion that "monkeys will never write shakespeare". One already did.

[heydude6]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

My biggest complaint is that this isn't even new research. Wikipedia has for years explained how even truly staggering numbers of monkeys won't be able to produce a novel let-alone Shakespeare. This has already been a settled question, and this article doesn't add anything new to the discussion.

[Eric Blank]

This is probably one of those things mathematicians do in their spare time/when they get bored/stuck on another problem - no funding provided or warranted - and then decide to publish anyway because why not and then the news finds it and try to make a big deal of what is basically the equivalent of posting to the wtf thread on your lunch break.

[martinuzz]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

Love that they used my profile pic in that story.

Also, I debate the assertion that "monkeys will never write shakespeare". One already did.

Humans are apes, not monkeys.

Also, that study can't be right.
During an infinite amount of time, surely the monkeys would evolve and achieve sapience well before the possible heat death of the universe (not to mention the factory warranty expiration date of the typewriters), surpassing our own feeble levels of civilization within just an infinitsimal fraction of infinite time, easily deducting, by virtue of their superiour intelligence, the possible existence of, and having their supreme AGI compose the complete works of Shakespeare, including those lost to the whims of time.

[NJW2000]

One nice thing about the infinite monkeys example is that it's an introduction to the concept of "almost surely".
An event will "almost surely" occur when it has 100% probability of occuring, but there are still possible outcomes where it does not occur.

For example, the complete works of Shakespeare will almost surely occur in a random string of the necessary letters and punctuation.

Questions like this lead to some unexpectedly deep mathematics quite quickly. Another nice one: if you pick a positive integer at random, what's the probability that it's prime?

[MonkeyHead]

Scientists continue to ruin everything.

I’m not sure if the wtf is this presumably receiving funding, they thought it was worth studying, that it was peer-reviewed and published, or that they don’t understand what “infinite” means.

Love that they used my profile pic in that story.

Also, I debate the assertion that "monkeys will never write shakespeare". One already did.

Humans are apes, not monkeys.

Also, that study can't be right.
During an infinite amount of time, surely the monkeys would evolve and achieve sapience well before the possible heat death of the universe (not to mention the factory warranty expiration date of the typewriters), surpassing our own feeble levels of civilization within just an infinitsimal fraction of infinite time, easily deducting, by virtue of their superiour intelligence, the possible existence of, and having their supreme AGI compose the complete works of Shakespeare, including those lost to the whims of time.

Counter-pedantry: if they evolved, they wouldnt be monkeys anymore.

Counter-counter-pedantry: As we are "evolved monkeys", they have already attained sapience and written Shakespeare.

[Starver]

Another nice one: if you pick a positive integer at random, what's the probability that it's prime?

Zero

[MonkeyHead]

Another nice one: if you pick a positive integer at random, what's the probability that it's prime?

Zero

Well, there is an infinite number of numbers, and less than infinite of them are prime, so that stands to reason. *shrug*