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

  • SimpleMachine@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    26
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • sugar_in_your_tea
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      6
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      2 months 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.

    • cammoblammo@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      4
      ·
      2 months ago

      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.