this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2024
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549
Typing monkey would be unable to produce 'Hamlet' within the lifetime of the universe, study finds (phys.org)
submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
195 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

The question that everyone has been dying to know has been answered. Finally! What will scientists study next?

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Ignoring the obvious flaw of throwing out the importance of infinity here, they would be exceedingly unlikely but technically not unable. A random occurrence is just as likely to happen on try number 1 as it is on try number 10 billion. It doesn't become any more or less likely as iterations occur. This is an all too common failure of understanding how probabilities work.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

The results reveal that it is possible (around a 5% chance) for a single chimp to type the word "bananas" in its own lifetime.

That sounds a little low to me. B and N are right next to each other, so I'd expect them to mash left and right among similar keys a lot of the time. Then again, I think we're expecting some randomness here, not an actual chimp at a typewriter, but that's probably more likely to reproduce longer works than an actual chimp.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I get annoyed when websites say something like, ´Using a password of this strength will take a a hacker one million years to brute force.´

No, it’ll take a million years to try every combination and permutation of allowed characters. Chances are your password will be tried much sooner than that.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

When they say such things, the are probably talking about the expected value, where those chances are taken into account, just like the number calculated in this article.