this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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An infinite amount of monkeys each given an infinite amount of time would produce all infinite strings possible on a typewriter (this includes ones that just happen to be terminated with a neverending substring of blank spaces, i.e. one where the monkey stops or presses whitespace keys and nothing else an arbitrary number of times).
If a cure for cancer exists and is expressable through language, they would not only produce one, but it would be there in every single language transliteratable to a Latin script; it would be there in ASCII art; it would be there in literally every text-based form imaginable. Of course the trouble would be sorting the infinite wheat from the infinite chaff.
Edit: https://libraryofbabel.info/ for the finite strings of 3200 characters.
I mean, even if the typewriter had an extra button setting off a bomb, killing the monkey and all the monkeys around them, they'd still pull it off. That's infinity baby.
The Library of Babel Jorge Luis Borges (1941)
A good read.
Neat https://libraryofbabel.info/bookmark.cgi?398:13
That is wrong assumption. We know that even when something is infinite it may never reach required value. Shakespeare or anything else may be a unique event in the infinite space-time universe.