According to a new study, the universe will die before a monkey can perform the complete works of Shakespeare.
He infinite monkey theorem is a long-repeated thought experiment that suggests that a monkey at a keyboard will eventually type all of the Bard’s output, from The Taming of the Shrew to Sonnet 154. But a new study published in Franklin Open concludes that the theorem’s conclusion is “correct, but misleading” and that “non-trivial text generation during the lifetime of our universe is almost certainly possible.”
When it comes to keyboard usage, monkeys don’t talk an infinite amount of anything (The merchant of Venice—look it up), but the principles of probability and randomness would eventually cause that gibberish to be replaced by fragments of written language. Given infinite time, those random keyboard inputs would execute even the Bard’s best bits: “to be or not to be,” “All the world’s a stage,” “I’ll compare you to a summer’s day,” and everything else.
But the lifetime of the universe (and therefore the end of time as we know it) is not enough time for that to happen, according to the recent research team.
“The infinite monkey theorem only considers the infinite limit, either with an infinite number of monkeys or with an infinite time period of monkey work,” said Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney and lead author of the study. , at a university. release. “We decided to look at the probability that a given string of letters will be written by a finite number of monkeys within a finite period of time consistent with estimates of the lifetime of our universe.”
In the study, the team wrote that they focused on chimpanzees as their ape subject, rather than all apes on Earth, “since chimpanzees are the closest relative of humans among the apes.” The team considered that the “working lifespan” of a chimpanzee was just over 30 years and that the heat death of the universe would occur 10 years ago.100 years after the start of the experiment.
The team calculated the results for a single chimpanzee, as well as for the entire population of chimpanzees worldwide (about 200,000), and assumed that the population would remain constant until the end of time. The team found about a 5% chance that a single ape would type “bananas” over its lifetime. Shakespeare’s complete works were a different beast.
“It is not plausible that, even with possible improved typing speeds or an increase in chimpanzee populations, these orders of magnitude can be expanded to the point that monkey work will ever be a viable tool for developing written works that go beyond the trivial.” the team wrote. “As such, we reject the conclusions of the Infinite Monkey Theorem as potentially misleading within our finite universe.”
To which the team added: “This evaluation effectively contradicts one of the most well-known pieces of popular mathematics, but it also firmly places the Infinite Monkey Theorem alongside other apparent paradoxes with contradictory results in the finite and infinite cases.”
This does not end the thought experiment. Chimpanzees will continue to evolve; If we give them a few million years, they could produce the new Shakespeare. Furthermore, thought experiments serve as just that (reasoning exercises) rather than any real-life attempt to put an ape in front of a keyboard and hope for a miracle.