this post was submitted on 14 Apr 2025
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I think too many people don't consider the monkey is not supposed to be making decisions, it's just supposed to be inputting anything, literally anything, on a typewriter.
Like a random value generator, for typewriter keys.
Worse, creationists use the "watch maker's paradox" as evidence of creation. Same idea but watch parts in a washing machine.
What about a rock formation that happened to be a sun dial?
The thought experiment is about how wrist watches are incredibly complex and hand crafted machines so if you dissemble one and put all the parts in a clothes dryer you won't get a watch back. (I believe given infinite time and random movements you would eventually get a watch.)
I mean, if they are actually monkeys who don't know to type, some of them will still press keys once or twice. And if there's infinite monkeys, they will still type it out.
Hell, if you have infinite time and infinite typewriters, you don't even need the monkeys. You could probably depend on hail pressing those keys, the argument still stands. As long as there are inputs, ever.
Just because a set is infinite does not mean that it will contain every possible permutation of something. That's a common thought but a provably untrue one.
For example, there are infinite even numbers, and none of them are 3. Not a single one. If someone claimed that generating infinite even numbers would eventually return a 3, you wouldn't take them seriously, and rightly so.
But here's the rub: you can also generate infinite even numbers and never return a 2. Every time you generate an even number, there are infinite numbers that it could be. Even if you don't allow numbers to repeat, it's not like you are gonna exhaust the amount of non-2 even numbers.
Just because a set is infinite does not mean that it will contain every possible permutation of something.
So back to the typewriters. You might say that while there are infinite numbers, there are not infinite permutations of a string of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare.
And that's true.
If you were to say that a string of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare (or longer) could never be repeated exactly, the yes they would type the works of Shakespeare.
But then they wouldn't be typing randomly.
Randomness repeats. Infinite randomness can repeat infinitely.
And we are not dealing with strings of characters the length of the works of Shakespeare. We're dealing with strings of characters of infinite length. And there are, in fact, infinite permutations of those.
So... Yeah.
There's no logical basis for infinite monkeys typing infinitely, inevitably producing the works of Shakespeare. Or fecal dioramas or alternate universes where Spider-Man is real or whatever else. Doesn't hold water.
The funny thing is, if you truly have infinite monkeys, it doesn't matter if they're using it correctly or not. There is an infinite amount of them.
Some infinities are bigger than others, though.
Even if you have countably infinite monkeys typing countably infinite strings for an infinite period of time, there will be an infinite number of strings that the monkeys haven't typed, that will never be in the set of completed typed strings.
Cantor's diagonalization proves it.