3 weeks ago
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The universe will die before a monkey manages to bang out the complete works of Shakespeare, according to a new study.
The Infinite Monkey Theorem is a long-rehashed thought experiment suggesting that a monkey on a keyboard will eventually type out the Bard’s entire 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 lifespan of our universe is almost certainly possible.”
As far as keyboard use goes, monkeys speak an infinite deal of nothing (The Merchant of Venice—look it up), but the principles of probability and randomness would eventually cause that gibberish to be replaced by bits of written language. Given infinite time, those random keyboard inputs would even execute the Bard’s best bits—”to be or not to be,” “All the world’s a stage,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day” and everything in between.
But the lifespan of the universe—and thus, the end of time as we know it—is not enough time for that to occur, according to the recent research team.
“The Infinite Monkey Theorem only considers the infinite limit, with either an infinite number of monkeys or an infinite time period of monkey labour,” said Stephen Woodcock, a mathematician at the University of Technology Sydney and lead author of the study, in a university release. “We decided to look at the probability of a given string of letters being typed by a finite number of monkeys within a finite time period consistent with estimates for the lifespan of our universe.”
In the study, the team wrote that it focused on chimpanzees as their simian subject, rather than all monkeys on Earth, “as chimpanzees are human’s closest relative amongst apes.” The team took a chimpanzee’s “working lifespan” to be just over 30 years and the heat death of the universe to occur 10100 years after the experiment’s commencement.
The team calculated the results for a single chimpanzee as well as the total population of chimpanzees worldwide (about 200,000), and assumed that population would remain constant until the end of time. The team found about a 5% chance that a single ape would type “bananas” in its lifetime. The complete works of Shakespeare was 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 spanned to the point that monkey labour will ever be a viable tool for developing written works of anything beyond the trivial,” the team wrote. “As such, we reject the conclusions from the Infinite Monkeys Theorem as potentially misleading within our finite universe.”
To which the team added: “This evaluation effectively contradicts one of the best-known pieces of folk mathematics but also firmly places the Infinite Monkeys Theorem alongside other seeming paradoxes with contradictory results in the finite and infinite cases.”
This doesn’t put the thought experiment to bed. Chimpanzees will continue to evolve—give them a few million years and they could yield the new Shakespeare. Besides, thought experiments have use as just that—exercises in reasoning—rather than any real-life attempt at putting an ape before a keyboard and waiting for a miracle.
