1mo ago

We were the monkeys all along

85 comments

Not just hamlet but the entire body of works accredited to Shakespeare
- damn, that monkey must be pretty prolific, perhaps even rivaling Shakespeare! Do we know their name?
  
  The name of the kid: Shakespeare
  
  Christopher Marlowe
  
  At least one overly-proficient monkey.
- We also drew dickibutt
  
  Life is amazing
- Yeah and all by one monkey.

Not on a typewriter though. Task failed successfully.
- Pretty sure some other monkey did tho
- If you're paying, I'll rewrite it on a typewriter for you.
- Someone must have written hamlet on a typewriter at some point

We're apes though.
Great ones even!
- Apes are monkeys, in the same sense that humans are apes.
  
  I'm not entirely sure that statement is correct, but it's been a while since I took any anthropology courses...
  Edit: I was wrong and remembered the tree incorrectly.
- We're Grapes
  
  Grape apes?

One of us even wrote:
It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times.
One of us even wrote this!

The monkeys are really the friends we make along the way

As the saying goes
An infinite number of multicellular organisms with an infinite number of writing utensils will eventually reproduce a recognizable literary work
- A more pithier way of putting it is that we are the universe experiencing itself.

A monkey wrote Hamlet. It got mediocre reviews.
- It was the BLURST OF TIMES?!?
  
  Unexpected Simpsons reference

We're apes, not monkeys, though.
- We’re both. Apes are a subset of old world monkeys.
  e: sorry, old, not new
  
  simiiformes / simians

And you don't start sentences with capital letters.
- nO I d'ont.
  
  You rebel
- I mean it's better than capitalizing Random Words because you think it Looks Cool and it will Make America Great Again!
  
  Or to write some WORDS completely in CAPITAL letters to CREATE disgusting CLICKBAIT titles.
- And you dont start sentences with and!
  Unless you really want to!
  
  No, it's ok! As long as you end every sentence with an exclamation mark! You can do anything! The only limitation is your imagination!

Not endless, i guarantee it.

Didn't some math nerd prove that they would need more time than exists in the universe to make this happen?
- It's been calculated many times, and yes, it would take an absurdly long amount of time, and that's the point. When dealing with infinities, time is irrelevant, whether you have infinite monkeys or one monkey and infinite time, they will still both do every possible thing a monkey could do.
  In fact, infinite monkeys would not only write Hamlet, they would write it instantly, an infinite number of times, and in all possible languages, as well as the possible sequel where Marvel's Blade shows up to fight vampires. Instantly.
  Good luck finding them though.
  
  Well, they wouldn't write it instantly - in the best case, they would start writing it instantly, and finish in optimal time. However, it's possible that no monkey would actually write it on the first try - we'd have to get into some complex predictions on monkey brains and physiology, it's possible that with their brains and muscle structure they wouldn't go for the kinds of character sequences to produce Hamlet, perhaps changing up patterns enough to produce something more random only after a certain amount of time.
  Depending on how you formulate the experiment, it could be that no monkey could finish it before physiologically having to take a break or something, returning to specific patterns afterwards that would render it impossible for it to finish writing Hamlet, and thus no monkey would ever write Hamlet in a continuous string of characters, from start to end.
  But yeah, if we just say they're typing completely random characters without pause forever, yup, infinity dictates some fraction of monkeys would immediately be on the right track and finish writing as soon as possible, for anything you can think of.
  
  100% and you probably know this, so I'm just addin: think of infinity as a sequence of infinite numbers. The number of all the even numbers, that stretch off into infinity, are also infinite. However, that infinite number isn't as big as regular infinity.
  You can have different sizes of infinity because when things get that big, the rules change. Its almost like infinity / 2 = smaller infinity.
- No. They proved it would take a finite number of monkeys longer than there is time in the universe. Not sure what the point of that paper was, since the theory involved an infinite number of monkeys.
- They obviously weren't very good at math if it already happened.
  
  Did the monkeys do it? Or Shakespeare?

Hamlet is a remake of and Old Norse legend Amleth.

Oh, my God, I was wrong, It was Earth all along!

We were there, monkeys all along. Or we were their monkeys all along. I'm so confused. This sentence makes no sense. My grammar sucks and i can't even work this out.

puts down small mammal
This llama is right!

Funny interpretation of the term 'endless' you got there

Am I the only one bothered by the use there instead of their?
- You made me reread the post looking for any there, their, of even they're.
  
  He edited the title

The whole premise of the analogy is that the typed characters are random, which is why the animal in it is one that doesn't understand written English. The point being that over an infinite amount of time, even totally random typing will, by definition, eventually produce any specified sequence.
OOP doesn't get it, nor does anyone who finds this clever.
- Struck a nerve, huh?
  It's like writing a joke based on the premise that exercise makes you gain weight. It doesn't, so any joke based on that is going to fall flat, except for people who think it does, lol.
- You must be so fucking fun at parties.
  
  I am, because my jokes are actually good, since I know how to actually construct a good joke, lol.
- There is nobody here that doesn't understand the premise of the original thought.. It does not invalidate a joke about evolved monkeys.
- This is shitposts, relax

85 comments