• If the monkeys were truly infinite would time even matter? For any set of monkeys that could write Hamlet within a year there’s an infinite number of duplicate sets, so they could do as much writing in one day as the original set would do over the age of the universe.

      •  millie   ( @millie@beehaw.org ) 
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        15 hours ago

        Considering that there are an infinite number of potential arrangements of keystrokes that aren’t Hamlet? I’m honestly not fully convinced that you’d necessarily get Hamlet to begin with, let alone in a finite amount of time. Could you? Sure. But an infinite set minus an infinite number of possibilities still leaves an infinite number of possibilities. Any or all of which could not be Hamlet.

        There are an infinite number of values between 1 and 2, but none of them are 3.

        • There aren’t an infinite arrangements of keystrokes that are the length of Hamlet and aren’t Hamlet. Hamlet is 191,726 characters long, it’s like guessing a password.

          44 keys on a typewriter, 191726 characters, makes 44^191726 or about 4.054 × 10^315094 combinations.

        •  Malgas   ( @Malgas@beehaw.org ) 
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          221 hours ago

          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.