Mathematicians have questioned the old adage that a monkey typing at random on a keyboard long enough would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
Two Australian mathematicians saw this as misleading and worked out that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never pen down the works of the bard.
The newspaper has the “infinite monkey pose”a thought experiment demonstrating that an infinite amount of time can make something incredibly improbable probable, by asking what would happen if generous, yet finite limits were placed on the monkey tickers.
Their calculations were based on a monkey that spent about 30 years typing one key per second on a keyboard with 30 keys – the letters of the English language plus some common punctuation marks. It found that the time it would take a typing monkey to repeat Shakespeare’s works would be longer than the lifetime of our universe.
The “heat death” of the universe is assumed to occur in about a googol of years – that’s a one followed by 100 zeros. Other more practical considerations – such as what the apes would eat, or how they would survive the sun engulfing the earth in a few billion years – were set aside.
There was only about a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime, according to the study in the journal Franklin Open.
Shakespeare’s canon contains 884,647 words – none of them bananas.
To extend the experiment, the Australian mathematicians turned to chimpanzees, the closest relative of humans. There are currently approximately 200,000 chimpanzees on Earth, and the study assumed that this population would remain stable until the end of time.
Even this massive monkey workforce fell far, far short.
“It’s not even like one in a million,” study co-author Stephen Woodcock of the University of Technology Sydney told New Scientist. “If every atom in the universe was a universe unto itself, it still wouldn’t happen.”
And even if many more chimps who typed much faster were added to the equation, it was still not plausible “that monkey labor will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial,” the authors wrote in wrote the study.
A previous trial of the thought experiment, which gave six Sulawesi crested macaques four weeks with a computer, produced only five pages of textmainly filled with the letter S.
