If a monkey types randomly on a keyboard long enough, he will eventually write out the complete works of Shakespeare.
This thought experiment has long been used to express how an infinite amount of time makes something that is incredibly unlikely – but still technically possible – become possible. .
But two Australian mathematicians believe the old adage to be misleading, saying that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifetime of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never write the works of the Bard.
The “Infinite Monkey Theorem” has been prevalent for over a century, although its origin remains obscure. It is usually attributed to either the French mathematician Emile Borel or the British anthropologist Thomas Huxley, and some even think that the general idea dates back to Aristotle.
For a light-hearted but peer-reviewed study published earlier this week, two mathematicians set out to determine what would happen if generous but limited limits were placed on monkey typists.
Their calculations were based on the observation that a monkey typed one key a second for about 30 years on a keyboard with 30 keys – the letters of the English language and some common punctuation marks.
The “heat death” of the universe was thought to occur in approximately a few years – that is, after 100 zeros.
Other more practical considerations – such as what monkeys would eat, or how they would survive the Sun engulfing the Earth in a few billion years – were set aside.
the monkey’s labor becomes less
According to the study in the journal Franklin Open, there was only a five percent chance that a single monkey would randomly type the word “banana” in its lifetime.
The Shakespeare canon contains 884,647 words – none of them bananas.
To broaden the experiment, mathematicians turned to chimpanzees, humans’ closest relative.
There are currently about 200,000 chimpanzees on Earth, and the study assumes this population will remain stable until the end of time.
Even this huge monkey workforce fell far short.
“It’s not even one in a million,” study co-author Stephen Woodcock, of the University of Technology Sydney, told New Scientist.
“Even if every atom in the universe were a universe in itself, this would not be so.”
And even if many more chimpanzees who typed much faster were added to the equation, it was still not plausible “that monkey labor would ever produce written works of anything beyond trivial would be a viable tool to develop,” the authors wrote in the study.
The study concluded by saying that Shakespeare himself may have inadvertently answered whether “monkey labor could meaningfully be a replacement for human effort as a source of scholarship or creativity”.
“To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: ‘No’.”
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
