Fresh doubt has been cast over the famous scientific proverb that if given an infinite amount of time, monkeys could type the complete works of Shakespeare.
Utilised for decades as the exemplar in conveying how incredibly unlikely events increase in probability thanks to the infinity of time, two Australian mathematicians have branded the thought experiment as misleading.
The old adage, which is often dubbed the ‘infinite monkey theorem’, is ‘almost certainly’ incorrect according to the mathematic duo.
Around for over a century, the theory has been commonly attributed to both French mathematician Emile Borel or British anthropologist Thomas Huxley or even back to the days of Aristotle in ancient Greece.
However, in a new peer-reviewed study conducted by the University of Technology Sydney, two math buffs set out to calculate what happens if a generous but finite amount of time was given to the would-be monkey typists.
Their calculations were based on a monkey spending around 30 years typing one key a second at a keyboard with 30 keys – the letters of the English language plus some common punctuation.
The study, which appeared in the Franklin Open Journal, found that under these circumstances, that a single monkey had a roughly 5 per cent chance of randomly writing the word ‘banana’ over the span of their life.
Unfortunately for the ‘infinite monkey theorem’ though, the oeuvre of William Shakespeare includes almost 900,000 words – none of them ‘banana’.
In an attempt to broaden out the experiment, the mathematicians added chimpanzees, the closest relatives of humans, to their equations.
Even in this instance, adding the roughly 200,000 chimps on earth, this massive monkey workforce still fell someway short of coming close to completing Shakespeare’s canon.
Speaking to the New Scientist, the study’s co-author Stephen Woodcock said that the chances of the theory coming to pass were ‘not even like one in a million’.
‘If every atom in the universe was a universe in itself, it still wouldn’t happen,’ he added.
Even if many more chimps who typed much quicker were added to the equation, it was still not plausible ‘that monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial,’ the authors wrote in the study.
The study concluded by saying that Shakespeare himself may have inadvertently given an answer as to whether ‘monkey labour could meaningfully be a replacement for human endeavour as a source of scholarship or creativity’.
‘To quote Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 3, Line 87: ‘No’.’
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