Universe will end before then No, monkeys will never type Shakespeare's work
A thought experiment says that a monkey typing away on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will eventually have written Shakespeare's complete works. Not true, say two mathematicians.
No time? blue News summarizes for you
- The "infinite monkey theorem" states that a monkey typing away on a keyboard for an infinite amount of time will have written Shakespeare's complete works at some point.
- Two Australian mathematicians argue in a new study that this will not happen.
- Their derivation has to do with numbers so large that they have no name.
Two mathematicians from Australia have challenged an old adage that says a monkey typing endlessly on a typewriter would eventually write the complete works of William Shakespeare. Mind you: without this monkey having any idea of what he was typing.
This thought experiment, known as the "infinite monkey theorem", has long been used to illustrate the principles of probability and randomness. In more detail, if a monkey presses enough keys, it is likely that at some point it will have typed the exact wording of all of Sheakespeare's published texts.
However, a new study by Sydney-based mathematicians Stephen Woodcock and Jay Falletta has found that the probability is too small to ever produce this result, as the BBC reports. This is because the time it would take a typing monkey to reproduce Shakespeare's plays, sonnets and poems would be longer than the expected lifespan of our universe. The researchers conclude that although the theorem is mathematically correct, it is "misleading".
The study has been peer-reviewed and found to be correct.
Just typing bananas could take billions of years
The research duo also took a close look at the typing capacity of a single monkey. Just to give the theorem another chance, they calculated the probability that all chimpanzees would type letters for their entire lives. There are currently around 200,000 living specimens.
But even then, according to the results, if every living chimpanzee pressed a key every second until the end of the universe, they would not be able to type the works of Shakespeare - it is not impossible that this would happen, but the probability is vanishingly small.
After all, the chance that one of these 200,000 monkeys would type the word bananas correctly is 5 percent. And the probability of a chimpanzee constructing a random sentence such as "I chimpanzee, therefore I am" is 1 in 10 million billion billion, according to research. That's a one with 25 zeros.
End of the universe: a number with 1000 zeros
The study authors conclude in their study: "It is not plausible that even with improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, monkey labor will ever be a viable means of developing non-trivial written works."
The question now is when the universe will cease to exist, or rather what hypothesis the mathematicians have based their calculations on. They rely on the heat death theory. This states that the universe has expanded and cooled down at the same time until everything in it decays and disappears. According to calculations, this will be the case in around11,000 years. There is no term for this number, it is a one with 1000 zeros.
Ausgeschrieben: 10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
So 200,000 monkeys would press keys and not even have written Hamlet. "This realization places the theorem among other probability puzzles and paradoxes... where using the idea of infinite resources yields results that are inconsistent with what we get when we consider the constraints of our universe," math professor Woodcock said in a statement about the work.
This article was created using artificial intelligence (AI). All content adopted from AI is verified by the editorial team.
