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[-] givesomefucks@lemmy.world 28 points 11 months ago

It's not literal.

It's a way to explain that any result is possible.

Like, throw some matter/energy in any closed system, and eventually, everything and anything possible will happen on an infinite timeline.

So sure, 99.9999999999999999% are going to poop on it, but on an infinite scale, you'd get Shakespeare

[-] Urist@lemmy.ml 12 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Well no. You can try to count every real number forever and you will miss infinitely many still. Some infinites are larger than others, hence I do not see any reason why "infinite time" would cover "every possibility happening". On the other hand, if you do have a mathematical proof you could refer to, I would be most grateful.

EDIT: To write out my example, let us consider a machine that picks a random number between 3 and 4 every second. Then there is every second a nonzero chance that this machine (assuming true and not pseudo randomness) will pick, say pi. The range of numbers picked constitute the image of a function from the whole numbers to the real numbers (up to isomporphism), which cannot be surjective. Hence there are numbers not picked even though there was a > 0 chance of picking them every second for an infinite time.

[-] GladiusB@lemmy.world 5 points 11 months ago

I hear what you are saying and agree. I never took the monkey Shakespeare theory seriously. It sounded a bit too poppy and quite honestly the guy that told me was a douche and pronounced giblets wrong. But as a theory you could get anything in a long enough time span and infinite amount of resources. Why or how that matters? Well I just don't see it.

[-] ji17br@lemmy.ml 3 points 11 months ago

Is it pronounced like gif?

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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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