The old adage goes that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite amount of time hitting random keys on a typewriter, one of them will eventually type out the complete works of William Shakespeare.
This concept—known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem—suggests that, given infinite time and random chance, any sequence of text, including something as complex as Shakespeare’s back catalog, would ultimately be produced.
However, according to a new paper in the journal Franklin Open, there is not enough time left in the universe’s entire lifespan for all the chimps alive today to write out the works of the bard.
“The long-established result of the Infinite Monkeys Theorem is correct, but misleading,” the University of Technology Sydney researchers wrote in the paper. “Non-trivial text generation during the lifespan of our universe is almost certainly impossible.”
In the study, the researchers calculated how likely a given string of characters being typed by one of a finite number of monkeys would take. They assumed that the keyboard contained 30 keys of English characters and punctuation marks, a finite number of 200,000 monkeys—based on the current population of chimpanzees—and a typing rate of one key per ape per second for the rest of the universe’s lifetime.
They discovered that, using these assumptions, it is extremely unlikely that all 884,647 words of Shakespeare’s works will be typed before the heat death of the universe.
“Given plausible estimates of the lifespan of the universe and the amount of possible monkey typists available, this still leaves huge orders of magnitude differences between the resources available and those required for non-trivial text generation,” the authors wrote.
In fact, there is only a 5 percent chance that one of the chimps would even get around to typing the single word “bananas” within its own lifetime.
So there you have it: a giant group of chimps (the LEDC) banging away at keyboards (throwing money at Business Pork for 21 years now) will never produce a Shakespearian work (fill the Business Pork with high-paying jobs).
Quod erat demonstrandum