Universe would die before monkey with keyboard writes Shakespeare, study finds
Mathematicians have called into question the old adage that a monkey typing randomly at a keyboard for long enough would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
Two Australian mathematicians have deemed it misleading, working out that even if all the chimpanzees in the world were given the entire lifespan of the universe, they would “almost certainly” never pen the works of the bard.
The paper tested the “infinite monkey theorem”, a thought experiment demonstrating that an infinite amount of time can make something that is incredibly unlikely become probable, by asking what would happen if generous yet finite limits were placed on the monkey typists.
Their calculations were based on a monkey spending about 30 years typing one key a second at a keyboard with 30 keys – the letters of the English language plus some common punctuation. It found that the time it would take for a typing monkey to replicate Shakespeare’s works would be longer than the lifespan of our universe.
The “heat death” of the universe was assumed to take place in around a googol of years – that is a one followed by 100 zeroes. Other more practical considerations – such as what the monkeys would eat, or how they would survive the Sun engulfing Earth in a few billion years – were set aside.
