this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
1170 points (98.8% liked)

Science Memes

11036 readers
5550 users here now

Welcome to c/science_memes @ Mander.xyz!

A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.



Rules

  1. Don't throw mud. Behave like an intellectual and remember the human.
  2. Keep it rooted (on topic).
  3. No spam.
  4. Infographics welcome, get schooled.

This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.



Research Committee

Other Mander Communities

Science and Research

Biology and Life Sciences

Physical Sciences

Humanities and Social Sciences

Practical and Applied Sciences

Memes

Miscellaneous

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 1 week 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 week 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 week 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 week 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.